Illuminum
by blueandblack
Summary: In which cutting your best friend out of your life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
1. Chapter 1

Severus Snape flung himself onto his bed and tore the dark-forest curtains over themselves. He fumbled for one of the many books that littered the mattress, pressed a piece of parchment already inked with brilliant, furtive words against the cover, and scrawled in darkness two more.

The quill was dry, and it scratched angrily at the thick parchment, scratched through to the cover of the book, and he imagined it would scratch through the book, heavy and full though it was, he imagined he would scratch through it, front to back, and then through feathers and sheet, through the iron frame below, through empty space, through stone and through earth, down, down, all the way down, inexorably, agonizingly, to the truth of the matter.

_Good-looking_ and _Excuse_ were the words he wrote.

And when he was finished he sat, cross-legged, head bowed, hands shaking over the engraving, and thought to himself how James Potter was good-looking, and how _Mudblood_ was Lily Evans' excuse to fancy him.

He had always known something like this would happen eventually - ever since the sorting hat had told them they were not the same, had told them they were not _allowed_ to be the same, and perhaps, if he was honest with himself, even before that.

Severus' friendship with Lily would have been everything to him if he had let it. From the first day he had watched her, wide-eyed and unafraid, making flowers dance, swinging impossibly into the sky, even before words had passed between them, even before he had known what it was to ache bodily for her the way he had since his thirteenth birthday when she had kissed his cheek and tugged his hair and said he was her favourite person at this school "and _that's_ saying something!"

Even before he had been in love with Lily Evans, he had felt a dangerous pull, a desire he knew would be disastrous, to _merge._

It had been different for her. For all Lily's kind whims, Severus had always had the sense that for her, their friendship was something like an uneasy convenience. And so, even before Hogwarts, even before Slytherin and Gryffindor and James Potter and the burgeoning greatness of Lord Voldemort, he had been acutely aware that there were things he might be tempted to do or say that would push Lily too far.

But, he thought bitterly, those things at least would not have made ending their friendship this _easy_ for her.

Six months ago when things were still hanging by a familiar sweet thread, he had almost asked her to the Yule Ball. It had been a foolish impulse, a brief moment of weakness. He had just heard Potter ask her, had heard her reply with one of those charming cliches along the lines of _Not if you were the last wizard on earth._

And in the hours that had followed those words, the hours she had chosen to spend with him, mixing potions down in the dungeon she always threatened to "fix up" for Slughorn, Severus had pretended to be buoyed.

He closed his eyes now, remembered, wondered: if he had known then what he knew now, would he have acted on that impulse? Would he have chosen to make it harder for her? Would it have been easier to bear her pity then than it was now to bear her contempt?

* * *

"I don't want to go at all," Lily sighed, "but Mary thinks she's the divination queen ever since she wangled that O out of Lessiar, and she says she's already seen me sneezing and shaking my head, and she already knows I'm faking it." She rolled a Persifus eyeball along the desk, grinned, said "Mary's damned bossy."

"You should go," Severus said with studied distraction, his eyes fixed resolutely on a mixture that had the potential to be earth-shattering - literally and figuratively - if all went according to plan. He watched it swirl itself around the beaker and added, without looking up or altering his expression "You like parties, don't deny it."

Lily groaned, hoisted herself up onto the empty desk behind her. "I like _some_ parties," she qualified. "I like the ones that don't involve Potter and Black and that little weasel that follows them around like they're Merlin and Arthur walking among us."

"You don't have to talk to them," said Severus carefully, leaning forward over a thick wad of parchment so that his ribcage was pressed firmly against against the desk.

He muttered to himself - _Elderbane, Wolfsberry_ - as Lily said haughtily "I know that! I just wish someone would inform them that they don't have to talk to _me._"

"I'd be happy to do that," Severus said, "Unless you'd prefer to take care of it yourself."

"I _take care_ of it all the time!" Lily retorted, with what Severus knew to be exaggerated frustration.

He said nothing, pressed his lips together, forced himself to write.

He had barely formed three tight words when Lily wriggled forward, reached out with a huffing sound and stole three of the Persifus eyeballs, and Severus thought perhaps he caught her out of the corner of his eye, because he knew what was coming, looked up at her for the first time in at least ten minutes, and despite himself, smiled a small smile that was, as always, far outdone by hers.

She was juggling them.

"Those are expensive," he said, still smiling.

Lily stuck her tongue out, kept her focus. "Good thing I was meant for the circus, then. Yes? Sev?"

It wasn't a question that needed answering; they had played this game before. Severus looked back down at his parchment, let his hair fall across his face to hide a widening of his smile that she was in no position to notice anyway.

It was at that moment that he almost said 'I could come with you, if you like. To the Yule Ball. Keep them out of your way.'

He wouldn't have gone through with it, obviously, later he would be confident of that fact. But Lily spoke before he could officially choose not to.

"_You'd_ make an excellent clown," she said, just as she caught the third ball in her free hand, tossed them back next to his cauldron.

Severus was writing again and he kept his syllables evenly spaced as he said "Strange. I have never thought of myself as particularly colourful."

Lily smirked; he didn't see.

She jumped down off the desk and leaned over his, just to the right of him, turned her head and peered with comical closeness at his profile. "You'd make a good sad clown," she said when enough time had passed to show she'd been giving the matter serious thought. "They wouldn't even have to put makeup on you since you're practically translucent and have _such_ a magnificent frown as it is."

"Oh Lily," Severus said, the words slow and far apart, as though not only his fingers but his mind were busy with others. "You are a consummate flirt."

She slumped down onto the desk and snorted a laugh. Severus wasn't sure whether she was amused by what he'd said or what she was about to say. "No, you'd be an _angry_ clown. A clown who absolutely _hated_ being a clown and absolutely _refused_ to be civil to his audience, let alone entertain them." She turned her head again, pressed her cheek to the smooth, cool wood of the bench and grinned toothily at him. "Mark my words, Sev, some day you will be terrifying children for a living."

Severus glanced briefly at the lock of rich, red hair that had been tickling the back of his right hand as he'd been writing, that was now slipping strand by strand down over the side of the desk.

He dropped his quill into the pot of ink, noted that it was almost empty, directed his gaze toward the earth-shattering potion still swirling of its own accord, thought but did not say '_Mark my words._ You may be right.'

And that had been it. End scene. The first and last time Severus had ever really thought about pushing Lily too far.

He hadn't been thinking when he finally had.

* * *

Lily flung herself into the armchair in the corner of the Gryffindor common room that was furthest from the door. She was breathing hard and her fingers curled reflexively around the upholstery, her nails scratching at the slim velvet like she was planning on tearing the whole thing to shreds.

A few late night voices murmured by the fire, Mary looked up from her homework. "You got rid of him, then?"

Lily nodded stiffly. The velvet tore too easily and she pulled her wand out of her jumper, muttered "Reparo," under her breath, dropped the wand clatteringly on the side table, started all over again.

"I still think we should report him," Mary said with a yawn as she flipped through the pages of her History of Magic textbook. "He shouldn't even be out of the snake pit at this time of night, let alone trying to force his way into the girls' dormitory." She began copying a lengthy quotation onto her parchment, muttered "It's disgusting."

"Yes," said Lily, "Disgusting," said Lily, and her voice rose with a note of hysteria as she got up out of the armchair and headed for the door. "He's so disgusting, isn't he? Severus Snape. _Slytherin Snivellus._ Who would want to be friends with him, anyway? I mean, really, _who._ And I tell you what, Mary, thank God he didn't get in here or he probably would have raped us all first chance he got. Yes I'm so glad I got rid of him. Thank God. Thank Merlin! _Disgusting!_"

Lily's voice echoed thinly through the hallway, and Mary looked up at nothing with half a nod and half a frown.

* * *

Lily wished he hadn't asked her so soon, but then, given the fact that he asked her at least once a week these days, she should have known.

She _had_ known.

And she had said yes.

And now she was sitting halfway between the lake and the forest with James Potter, and the sun was out and he was lying on his back with his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, puffing smoke rings into the air from the tip of his wand.

She was the envy of every girl at Hogwarts, even of the Slytherins she'd wager, and she felt important and glamorous and uneasy every time he looked at her.

He was careful not to do that too often. Not because he had any idea that Lily Evans had chewed her nails through last night and regrown them in a jagged panic twenty minutes before their _This is not a date_, not because he had any idea that she had been sobbing into her pillow five minutes after that... James was careful not to look at Lily too often because he had realized early on, or perhaps somehow he had simply always known, that girls didn't fancy you nearly as much as they should if you paid them too much attention.

He'd had to pay her a_ lot_ of attention to get her here. Now it was time to play it cool.

"Heard Snivellus tried to tear our door down the other night," he said, raising an eyebrow at the sky.

Lily's eyes flickered to her fingernails. She wriggled her toes in the grass. She said nothing.

"Heard you told him to drag his skinny arse back to the pit where he belongs."

He smirked at the way that sounded, and Lily said "You weren't there."

It wasn't a question, but perhaps it had sounded like one, because James answered it.

"Was out," he said, reaching for his butter beer with lazy fingers. He smirked again. "Fucking with centaurs in the Forbidden Forest."

"Ah," said Lily, because suddenly she couldn't think of anything else to say. James had rolled over onto his stomach and his face was very close to hers.

"You look fucking gorgeous, Evans," he said, blinking sleepily in the sunlight. His hair fell messy-perfect into his wide hazel eyes as he dipped his head to the side, smiled in a way that made his cheeks dimple and his jaw flex. He took a swig of butter beer and swallowed a long, slow line down his throat to his open shirt collar.

Lily swallowed too. A smile fluttered up from her chest. "I'm not sure I can take your compliments seriously when you're not even wearing your glasses, Potter," she said.

James looked down, grinned to himself like that was the best thing she could have said. He shifted his weight and lifted one arm from under his body, reached out, tapped Lily's nose.

* * *

It was hard not to be happy. James was good to her, that was the truth. And he kissed her - the first time, the second time, the hundredth time, the time he didn't stop till they were both naked and panting in each other's arms... it felt incredibly good. _He_ felt incredibly good. The palely golden skin over his shoulders was smooth and taut, and though he was not what Ellen Graham liked to call a "beefcake", his chest was broad, his thighs were strong, and he was warm and solid through, and sometimes, in those quiet exhilarated moments afterwards, when he looked down at Lily and grinned and ran his hand through his hair that was laced with sweat and still messy-perfect, she thought to herself that he was lit up from the inside.

He was still a prick, sometimes, to some people, Lily knew it. But it was hard to be angry when he was so very _good_ to _her._

And besides, Lily, whilst never quite a sap, was romantic enough to tell herself this was fate: James and Lily, King and Queen of Gryffindor, beautiful and brave and bound to do great things together...

Sometimes it seemed like this, loving James Potter, might be the reason she had been born different from her sister, different from her parents, different from any but the most distant and shadowed of her relatives...

Sometimes it seemed like this might be the reason she had come to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The thought first occurred to her eight months after _Not a date_, four months after she'd stopped ducking away when he leaned in, three days after they had given in to the increasingly fevered urge to get each other naked - _'Wait till you're of age' be damned, this is_ fate.

That was when it first occurred to her, sitting at the Gryffindor table one morning in front of a plate of toast and marmalade, and the moment it did, Lily found herself thinking of Severus.

Her parents had never told her that there was such a thing as a witch or a wizard outside of storybooks. It was not that they had been ignorant of it themselves; they had heard the stories and had had reason to believe them. It wasn't that they disapproved of magic or feared it, far from it. They had in fact been wary of putting ideas into their daughters' heads at a young age - of feeding them hopes of being gifted that would very likely be dashed.

Lily thought of Petunia and the pitiful-brave letter she had written to Dumbledore and understood why they had chosen to keep silent.

But the fact remained that she and Tuney had been alone with her strange power, and in her smaller moments Lily had been confused, afraid even, unable to understand the terrible and wonderful things she could bring about.

Until Severus.

Her parents had known there was an outside chance one or both of their daughters would begin to exhibit signs of being a witch and so they had been vigilant, and _yet,_ Lily thought, somehow, by some strange twist...

It had been Severus who had first seen her for what she was. It had been Severus who had told her that the magical things she was doing were indeed _magic_, and that to be a witch was a wonderful thing.

So if James was her destiny, what had Severus been?

Some kind of a guide?

_Oh he would hate that,_ Lily thought with a rueful smile, _My guide to this table. My guide to James Potter, of all people._

She looked up at that moment and caught James' eye. He winked and her whole torso contracted at the thought of the delicious things they had done last night under the shield of a very, very strong _Muffliato_ charm.

Lily grinned absent-mindedly, and by the time she realized it was time for class, everybody else was up and heading for the door.

She looked down at her plate and realized she had hardly eaten a bite. Her stomach growled belatedly, and she grabbed a piece of miserably unbuttered toast, shoved it in her mouth and reached for her books.

James was there in an instant. "I can take the books or the toast," he said airily, "Your choice."

She held out her books to him and he slid them easily under his arm on top of his own, took her hand with his free one. Lily hurried after him, munching the dry toast as she went.

When they got to Muggle Studies, James dropped his books at his desk, Lily's at hers, next to Mary. Then he stepped back and looked her over appraisingly, one dark eyebrow raising as he did.

"You look low, Evans," he said softly.

Lily stared into his eyes for a beat and suddenly the moment felt horribly, uncharacteristically serious. Her heart began to beat faster in her chest and she shook her head, said as softly as he had "I think I'm just a little tired."

James grinned, stepped forward and drew her to him. His arms crossed over the small of her back and he leaned down low, pressed a kiss to her neck under her hair, whispered conspiratorially "I'll try not to wear you out too much tonight."

And then Mersley was marching into the room, telling everybody to sit down and open their textbooks to page 793, and it was the only order Lily was able to follow before her mind began to wander.

She was thinking of James. She was thinking of the things they had done last night, of the promise of the things they would do tonight. She was thinking of the way he had hugged her a moment ago, of the feel of his arms, strong around her, of his shoulders, hard-soft under her fingers, of his lips against her neck, and the words that had whispered their way into her skin.

And then, without any appropriate mental segway that she could point to, she was thinking of Severus again.

She barely saw him anymore. He must have dropped Care of Magical Creatures and he never seemed to be around at meal-times - although, to be fair, she had been doing everything in her power not to notice whether he was there or not.

Lily wondered: if this went on much longer, would she would begin to forget what he looked like?

She shook her head slightly at that ridiculous thought - she still remembered what Grandmother Phoebe looked like after all and she hadn't seen her in eleven years.

She glanced at Mary's book next to hers and flipped through the three pages she had missed, wrote down a few randomly selected words that were echoing around the room.

And then, her quill stopped moving, and she closed her eyes, summoned a long, thin, pallid face into the darkness.

By any objective standard Severus Snape was ugly. Lily knew this to be true, and if she had ever been in danger of forgetting it, she knew that her Gryffindor girlfriends would have been there to remind her.

But, she wondered, without quite meaning to... Would he _feel_ ugly?

It had not felt ugly on those rare occasions when she had hugged him. It had not felt ugly on those even rarer occasions when he had let her hold onto him for longer than his customary _"Yes, alright Lil, Happy Christmas if you must."_

In that moment, quite startlingly, Lily wished that she had never come to Hogwarts. _Hogwarts,_ which, though she loved her parents, though she loved Petunia even through their adolescent rages, had always been her home of homes, the revelation of her path in life, the ultimate legitimizing of her true being.

And yet she wished, fleetingly, but powerfully, that she had never come to this school. She wished that Severus had been an ordinary boy, even if that would have meant she had to be an ordinary girl.

Lily opened her eyes, wrote more jumbled words, stared at the ink as it buried itself in the parchment, remembered a moment when she had tried to pretend that she and Severus were ordinary.

Two Christmas Eves ago, Spinner's End, snow had been falling and Lily had fumbled in darkness, set her alarm an hour earlier than Petunia's, turned the volume down low and gathered it into her arms under the covers, hugged it to her chest like she had hugged her stuffed polar bear to her chest the year before...

* * *

Petunia stumbled down the stairs at seven AM and found Lily already up and dressed, on her knees under the Christmas tree, laughing.

She was laughing at something the person beside her had just said, and the person beside her was Severus Snape.

"What's he doing here?" Petunia asked, making no attempt to disguise the displeasure mingled with her surprise.

Severus, who had been laughing too, in that slow near-soundless way he had of laughing, darkened. By the look on his face, he was ready to say something like _Because your sister still believes in the wrong kind of fairies._

Lily spoke quickly.

"His father has to work Christmas," she lied. "His mother has a migraine," she lied again. And before Severus could object, before Petunia could complain, she snatched up a present from under the tree, shuffled toward her sister on her knees and said "Happy Christmas, Tuney."

Petunia took the package, muttered a quiet "Thank you," kept reproachful eyes on Severus as she squeezed the red ribbon over one corner.

It was a diary, the kind with a lock on it and a key to match, and Petunia was very pleased.

She stalked over to the tree, gave Lily her Christmas present, which was a pale pink cardigan with silver buttons, and Lily thanked her profusely and tried it on, and Severus knew she would never wear it, because it clashed with her red hair and her green eyes, and it clashed also with all the red and gold in her wardrobe - he had often noted, with some irritation, that Lily never quite seemed able to drop the Gryffindor thing, even on holidays.

Once the exchange was over, Petunia curled up on a distant corner of the sofa, opened her diary, pulled out the little ball-point pen ensconced in the side and began to write. She looked up and glared at Lily and Severus frequently as she did, and Severus smiled in that long, liquid way he had of smiling.

"Lily, I think your sister is writing all sorts of awful things about us in her new diary," he said.

"For your information," Petunia replied haughtily, "I'm writing about Vernon. He's my boyfriend you know," she said, and then, her mouth curling, her narrowed eyes on Severus, "Not just my _friend._"

Lily pretended not to hear either of them, busied herself adjusting the baubles on the tree.

"Oh yes," Severus said, his smile still firmly in place, "I'm sure that your boyfriend Vernon is a fascinating subject."

"Well _you're_ never going to know anything about him, _that's_ for sure," Petunia declared gleefully, "Or anything _else_ I may or may not choose to write about."

Severus raised an eyebrow, Petunia raised her key.

"Yes, it's a pretty piece of metal, isn't it," Severus said, leaning back on his elbows in a show of nonchalance, "Although of course, people like us," he gestured from himself to Lily, "don't rely on pieces of metal to open things."

Petunia blanched, gripped the diary tightly. "You wouldn't dare!" she screeched. "You're not allowed to use magic outside of school!"

"True," Severus said, with a quick glance at Lily who gave him a quick eye-roll in return, "But nobody ever said we couldn't steal outside of school."

At that moment, Lily's parents entered the room with matching dressing gowns and matching smiles, and before any Christmas greetings were exchanged, Lily's father said "I'm fairly sure I've told you you can't steal, haven't I Lily? If not, let's remedy that, shall we? Lily - and Severus, for that matter, and _Happy Christmas,_ Severus, how nice to see you here! - you may not steal, whether you are at Hogwarts or not."

Severus' palms pressed rigidly into the carpet. Lily nudged the nearest one with her foot, gave him a stern look, got up to hug her parents.

"Happy Christmas, Mr and Mrs Evans," Severus said.

He managed about half an hour after that, did his best not to look disdainfully at the candy canes Mrs Evans stuffed into his pockets, smiled in a way he hoped was something approximating to pleasant, said he had to get home as his mother would be wanting him to brew her some tea.

"Yes, you'll be brewing _tea_ all day today, I'm sure," Lily huffed as she followed him out to the front door.

He didn't say a word, and she sighed, said with a wry smile, "I suppose I should be congratulating you. Forty minutes is a record, isn't it?"

Severus smiled tightly. He suddenly wanted to be gone from this place more desperately even than he had anticipated he would and he was halfway out the door when Lily handed him a package.

_Presents,_ he thought. _Of course._

He held it in his hands and stared at it for a moment, as if hoping he might be able to make a break for it without actually opening it, and when he hadn't moved for a full ten seconds, Lily snatched it back from him, opened it herself.

"Here," she said, handing him the lumpy contents, "I knitted it for you. It took bloody forever, too."

It was an inordinately long scarf, and as Severus' fingers closed around the soft, thatched wool, he noted that it was a rich, dark red, almost the same shade as her hair.

"You could have enchanted the needles," he said gently, watching as he slid the scarf slowly between his pale hands.

"Yes, but that wouldn't have been any fun, would it?" Lily said, exasperatedly.

Severus laughed. He looked up, his brow furrowed, peering at her like suddenly she was the strangest person in his world.

Lily laughed too, shook her head, took the scarf from him and unrolled it. "You never wear colour," she said. "It's downright gloomy, Sev."

"I wear green," he objected, and Lily, who had been rising up on tip-toes, paused, looked off to the side, said quickly "Only because you have to."

Severus chose not to deny it. It was half-true, after all. All house pride aside, he would have chosen to dress exclusively in black.

The awkwardness dissolved into his silence, and Lily was leaning forward and reaching up again, because although she was not particularly short, Severus had always been particularly tall, and so she rose up, tossed the scarf in a loop over his head, wound it twice around his neck.

"There," she said, stepping back to admire her handiwork. "Much more cheerful."

Severus frowned exaggeratedly and she laughed, covered her face with her hands, didn't hear it, didn't see it, when he barely mouthed "Thank you."

"Don't you have something for me?" she asked, when she'd recovered from her fit of giggles. Her hands found her hips and she lowered her head, looked mock-menacingly up at him. "We agreed there would be presents this year, Severus."

"We did," he conceded, remembering what he'd traded two of his cleverest secrets for last month. He reached into his pocket, dug through the wretched candy canes and fished out a small leather pouch.

He handed it to Lily and she opened it eagerly, pulled out a tiny purple stone.

"It's pretty," she said softly, but if she knew Severus, and she did, she knew that pretty was not the point.

"What is it?" she asked.

Severus waited till she'd looked up at him to answer. "It's an Illustrum," he said in a voice that was lower than low. "It draws your thoughts into pictures - the magical kind. The kind that seem to live and breathe."

Lily's eyes widened and she looked back at the little stone in the palm of her hand. "Like a movie?" she asked, absently, as she pushed it around with her finger.

"It's much better than that," Severus almost-snapped.

Lily looked up just as sharply as he had spoken, was about to mutter 'Sorry,' when he leaned in close and spoke again, lower than low, dense, quick, somehow measured and urgent at the same time.

"It's like a thousand movies your mind makes," he said. "It shows you the stories you tell yourself when you're not paying attention."

Lily swallowed, felt a thrill of anticipation struggle through her, from the left of her forehead where the words had tickled her skin, all the way down to the soles of her feet. She breathed quickly, closed her hand around the stone, rested against the door-frame.

Severus did not move.

They waited.

And then Lily turned, glanced quickly back toward the living room. And then she took half a step that was all the space between them, over the threshold, into the snow that had begun to fall again.

"How does it work?" she whispered.

"I'll show you at school," Severus whispered back.

Lily smiled, her eyes flitting from the stone to his face.

And then she was reaching for him, and then he was gone.

* * *

Lily shook herself from her reverie, reminded herself that sweet-grudging Christmas presents were long gone, that they had been replaced with dark spells and Death Eaters and the word that still rang in her ears: _Mudblood._

A dull ache curled in her stomach at the memory, at the unbearable collision of Severus' eyes as he'd said that cruel word and his arms around her as she had hugged him on her doorstep on Christmas day, and as it did, Sirius and James turned to receive the mirth of their class-mates at some particularly witty exchange that she had missed.

Lily half-laughed, guiltily.

Lily winced.

She had half-laughed then too hadn't she? She had half-laughed, guiltily, when James had tipped Severus upside down, when the crowd had roared around them.

She found herself wondering now, for the first time in nearly nine months, whether Severus had seen.

* * *

Severus had dropped Care of Magical Creatures. It was a useless subject anyway, a pure waste of his precious time. He had only signed up for it because it was the only time he -

It was the only class that Slytherin shared with Gryffindor.

Severus had stopped attending meal-times in the Great Hall. Once he had become hungry enough he had found a way down to the house elves in the kitchen; he had no particular desire to eat, but he did not want to starve either.

There was work to be done. There were expectations to be met.

No. _Exceeded._

He would exceed them.

He would exceed _it._

The gnawing at his throat. The constant throb beneath his ribs.

_He would exceed it._


	2. Chapter 2

**Warning:** This chapter is pretty unpleasant in parts and may contain triggers for people who have been, or whose families have been, the victims of racially-motivated violence.

* * *

It was after midnight and all the lights were out and he was on his knees at her door.

The fat lady shook her head, clucked her tongue. "You're a sorry sight, boy," she said. "Blubbering like you were born yesterday. What would your father say? What would your mother do? And don't tell me 'Nothing' again, because 'Nothing' is nonsense, _you mark my words._"

She stood aside, and somebody stepped out.

_At last,_ Severus thought, as the inside-glow spilled across his face, _At last,_ he thought, and _Lily..._

Lily looked down at him, out at him. She was backlit in soft-rippled veils of red, and Severus said "I'm sorry."

The words were weak but she tumbled down around him.

"I'm sorry," he said again, and "It's not true."

_What would your father say? What would your mother do?_

The portrait was talking again and Severus talked over it.

He said "It's not true that we're not the same," and "I can't bear that we're not the same." He pulled Lily's arm out through the sleeve of her dressing gown, wept into the skin.

"Please," he said, "Help me," he said, "Don't hate me," he said.

Lily curled around him. It was a long time before she spoke.

"Oh Severus," she said slowly, finally, without moving. "I only hate you because I love you."

* * *

Severus was stumbling out of bed before he woke. He swayed into consciousness, stood in the centre of the room, breathing heavily.

He felt sick - sick like he was going to _be sick._

_I can't bear... Please... Help me..._

The words were a dim cacophony and he opened his eyes wide, lurched forward, balance lost, fell onto Tenbridge's still-made bed, pressed his lips together and wrapped his arms over his stomach.

It didn't help. He couldn't escape them - the words and the way they'd tugged his mouth into strange, sobbed shapes. He couldn't escape them in here, he realized.

He got up, took two quick steps, stumbled onward to the empty Slytherin common room and said to himself, out loud, "It was a dream," and as he did, he nodded at nobody, and his breathing slowed.

He stood straight.

And then, in the gathering silence, he said again "It was a dream," and his chest swelled violently, he fell against the tall oak archway, he gripped its edges with tight fingers, he whispered like a secret "_Lily..._"

* * *

It was the summer holidays before seventh year and Severus had not gone home.

He had not gone home the previous year either.

His parents hadn't minded, or if they had, they hadn't told him or anybody at the school so.

The truth was he would have chosen not to go home ever again, from the moment he had first set foot in the Great Hall six long years ago, an overgrown, underfed, angry child, hiding a mess of shabbiness under a new black cloak.

He would have chosen not to go home ever again, if home hadn't had Lily in it.

And so it was the summer holidays before seventh year and Severus was at Hogwarts and it was good. It was peaceful. This was the perfect void in which to work, unfettered by classes and exams, undisturbed by human contact.

Several of the Slytherins had stayed behind this year too, so he was not as alone as he would have liked to be. But they, like him, were busy, and everybody adopted an unearthly quiet in those two full months spent working in the perfect void.

Severus was relieved to find that when he passed Mulciber and Avery in the halls, a nod of acknowledgment was enough to satisfy them.

* * *

Lily was busy too. She had a summer internship for six of her eight weeks at the Ministry of Magic, and the remaining two were spent in the North of France with James and his family, who were charming and wealthy and had many friends and knew a lot about having a good time.

She was glad to avoid Spinner's End. Last year she had spent all her time in her room, thinking of James, trying not to think of James, afraid to venture out, in case Severus was waiting on the sidewalk to remind her of the way they used to be when the days were lazy and they had nothing but themselves and each other to think about.

She hadn't known he had stayed at Hogwarts, and the sight of the long, darkening bend that led to the little house she had never been invited into had sent her, on those rare occasions her gaze had braved it, into a nameless panic.

* * *

The school year saw Lily and James more sunburnt than tanned, but bright-eyed, big-smiled, and inseparable in a way they had not been before.

There was something about holidaying with somebody that bonded you to them, and though they had been separated by walls and watchful eyes at night in a way they had not been at Hogwarts, those two weeks in the North of France had felt intimate in different ways.

The result of this was that when they entered their seventh and final year, they were very used to being James and Lily, King and Queen of Gryffindor - they could be it anytime, anywhere, no matter who was watching and no matter what they might have to say about it.

They were the kind of couple, now, who shared a textbook in class, who didn't bother to whisper things like "I love you," and James took the ribbing from Sirius about having been transfigured at some point during the holidays into a "fucking handbag" with good-natured shrugs, and light squeezes of his owner's hand.

They had been made head boy and girl. The owls had come to them in Paris on a sunsoaked day, and Lily had torn open the letter, done a victory dance at the top of Notre Dame, tripped over her bell-bottoms and squealed as the city had lurched glitteringly before her.

James had caught her, after she had steadied herself. She had never been in any real danger of plummeting to her death, but she had shaken like a leaf and cursed like a sailor anyway, made a face at the nearest gargoyle, and announced, quite firmly, once they had made their way back down to earth, that there was no way in hell he was getting her up the Eiffel Tower - "not without a broom between my legs."

* * *

The school year saw Severus in the Potions dungeon. He had gone from straight O's in his fifth year, in every subject, including the drivel that was Care of Magical Creatures, to wantonly neglecting everything but Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts and Muggle Studies. Professor Stitch, head of Slytherin House, had encouraged all his students to inquire about the latter subject in that final year, and, as they had not taken it at O.W.L. level and therefore could not take it at N.E.W.T. level, a remedial class had been put together to accommodate their interest.

Dumbledore had been surprised and pleased by the Slytherin students' newfound desire to learn about their non-magical counterparts. He had been more than happy to allow the remedial class, had in fact taken on the burden of teaching it himself.

Severus deduced with a grim smile that the Headmaster must not have heard the message from the top, the words whispered in dark corridors, child-to-child.

_Know thine enemy._

Severus had barely raised an eyebrow when he'd been told the reason Stitch wanted them in Muggle Studies. He had expected as much. And he had thought of _Lily and James, King and Queen of Gryffindor,_ said to himself that he knew his enemy already. He knew him - _her_ - all too well.

He signed up with the others, sat dutifully in Dumbledore's class, ready to learn, with hushed guidance from Stitch, about floods and famines, wars and wonders he very much doubted he would wonder at.

A good deal of the first term was dedicated to the purging of the jews that had taken place earlier in the century, and Dumbledore used the word "tragedy" nineteen times in an hour - Avery counted, reported this amusing fact to Stitch when they met in his office at the end of the day.

"A tragedy indeed!" Stitch laughed. "A tragedy, that is, that the Muggles did not manage to cannibalize themselves still further! But at least it dealt with some of them - a good chunk really." He sighed, leaning back in his chair, his eyes roaming his students' faces. "Of course the Nazis were fools with their grandiose notions of religious and racial..." He raised his hands, made air-quotes "...'purity'. They're all the same under their skin, however much they might wish otherwise. But still. Those are the kind of Muggles we may want on our side - resourceful, methodical, steely to the bitter end."

"Muggles?" Jodie Latham asked, incredulous. "Muggles on our side?"

Stitch waved a hand dismissively. "I would imagine that such alliances would be temporary. But having said that, I would not presume to know the Dark Lord's mind. Such matters will, as is always and rightly the case, be for his discretion. His alone." He nodded to himself as if to punctuate that sage thought.

"But yes," he continued, when nobody spoke. "A tragedy, quite, quite! A tragedy that it was _stopped,_ and that when it was, it stunned the muggle world into believing in peace. For the most part they cling to it now, like frightened children clinging to their mothers' skirts." He made a low sound in the back of his throat like bile rising, tilted his head to one side. "There are interesting things happening at last though, on far-off continents. We shall see..."

"I see! I saw - in Divination," Brandon Palmer said eagerly. "I saw it starting - with the gunfire in Iraq and Afghanistan. Plenty of muggles caught in the middle, and it'll spread this time. It's going to happen, I know it!"

Stitch nodded slowly, one corner of his mouth curling into a smile. "Unless, of course, _we_ happen first."

The room erupted with murmurs at this statement, and Severus found himself speaking above them. "We?" he asked. "Who is 'we'?"

Everybody fell silent. Stitch eyed him curiously, ran a leathery thumb back and forth over his lips before he said "We is us, Severus. Wizards whose blood is..." he hesitated, "strong, shall we say. Friends of the great Voldemort."

"Friends?" said Severus. "I've never met him."

Stitch laughed and the whole group followed suit.

"Oh that is unfortunate," he said, running his thumb again over his lips that were parted, still curved with mirth. "I shall have to remind the Dark Lord to pencil you into his schedule."

* * *

It was the fourth class of the year and Dumbledore raised a hand that was old and gnarled and brilliant, wordlessly summoned a Pensieve before him.

"This exercise is not for the faint of heart," he said.

He turned his palm up and a tiny silver phial appeared in it.

"Any of you who would prefer not to take this journey with me may excuse yourselves now. But I would advise you, if you feel you are able, to seize this rare opportunity to see things..." He looked up at the class as he tipped the contents of the phial into the Pensieve, finished heavily "... for what they really are."

Several people looked around the room at each other. The two Hufflepuffs who had joined the class conferred in hushed, anxious tones. Nobody left.

And within moments, they were in a different world.

It was bitterly cold. The landscape was wide and sparse.

Shots rang out, bodies fell limply into frozen dirt. Some that had not been torn open fell nevertheless under the weight of others, and the eyes of the living stared up at the sky above, as empty as the eyes of the dead.

_Du! Was machst du denn? Schwein und Schweinchen, wie süß..._

Severus turned his head, followed an armed man who strode, barking as he did, toward a vast expanse of... people, he supposed. They must be people. He peered at them through a thin mist, and they seemed to come closer as he did.

There were children in rags, dulled stars sewn into them. There were women clutching bundles, turning in slow circles. There were men with hollowed out faces, some on their knees, begging without shame.

_I can't bear... Please... Help me..._

Severus' hands began to shake. He looked down, horrified, buried them quickly inside his cloak.

_Zwei und zwei! Schnell, schnell!_

The people scrambled to comply with the foreign command. Booted feet kicked at stray shins. Four young men ran - no, not ran, not really, you could barely call it running when they had only taken two steps before they were gunned down. A thin voice that could have been male or female wailed and was silenced.

Severus looked back at the bodies in the ditch, saw a pair of hands clawing at the dirt, turned his head again to the ragged group that was fumbling its way into straight lines. Something had happened. He was not sure what, but the result of it had been more gunfire, another man dead on the ground.

A young girl was clinging to him, screaming "Vati! Vati!"

She was twelve, maybe thirteen, he thought. She looked around wildly, screamed again "Vati!" as she saw the soldiers heading towards her. She threw herself forward, pressed her ear to the man's chest as though to check whether he was breathing, and it was pitiful and pointless, because there was blood seeping under him and over him and his mouth was loose and open and there was no sound. No sound but the soldiers' feet crunching gravel, no sound but the girl screaming - "Vati! Vati!" - and as a tall man leaned down and seized her arm, she looked up, her face the word terror, and Severus saw that her brown hair had been painted a rich, dark red.

His eyes bulged, his body seemed to wring itself out.

He turned away without thinking, gulped for air, felt something under his ribs clinging and struggling, _screaming,_ he thought, and he heard it still, over and over, _Vati, Vati,_ and _Nein!_ and _Bitte, bitte, bitte schön!_

_What would your father say? What would your mother do?_

Severus' feet clutched at his shoes, his shoes clutched at the ground. One hand found his wand, the other shuddered uselessly against his thigh. He stared off into the distance, his eyes still wide and straining, and he tried to imagine the voices were slipping away, that he was moving without moving, gliding off to the horizon, and the voices were slipping away, fading into a dim buzz like words that meant nothing.

_Mudblood,_ he thought, and his muscles were sponges in angry hands again. He breathed in a sound like _Ahh,_ gripped his wand hard, pressed down with his index finger, up with his thumb, like he didn't even care if it snapped, like maybe, madly, he _wanted_ it to, and then...

"Scared, Snivellus?" Avery sneered, and he was too loud and too close, and something in Severus seemed to break.

He whirled around to face Avery, drew out his wand and hurled a ready word into the ice-sharp air.

_"Crucio!"_

The scene dissolved. They were standing in the classroom again and the Pensieve was a mess of shards on the floor.

_"Snape!"_ Dumbledore roared. "No magic! No magic in the memory, _you know this!"_

Severus was shaking, the way you shake when you're trying very hard not to move at all. His wand was still raised.

And Avery had raised his. His eyes were darkened and narrow, his teeth were bared, and he was not where he should have been, Severus noted. He was not prostrate on the floor in an unforgivable grip, writhing in pain.

Severus lowered his wand.

"I apologize," he said stiffly. "I was overcome."

"_Overcome,_" Avery spat. "You'll pay for this!"

Dumbledore stepped between them. "No he won't," he said, his voice its at its customary low pitch. "Not by your hand, Avery."

Avery turned to Dumbledore, turned his wand too. "Or _what?_" he hissed.

Dumbledore held his gaze, made no reply.

Avery's face twisted with fury, but it was not long before he lowered his wand, turned away, muttered with a hint of something like a smile "You're the boss."

"Class dismissed," Dumbledore said with a wave of his hand. The students who had not already left the room made their way toward the door, and as he watched them go, still shaking, still trying very hard not to move, Severus noticed that many of them looked as he had never seen them before.

The two Hufflepuffs were crying. So was one of the Slytherin girls.

"Detention, Severus," Dumbledore said, when everybody was gone. "Every night of the week and every night of the next too. You are lucky that the pensieve took the curse. If it had not... If you had done what I fear you meant to do, I would have had no choice but to expel you. And the Ministry would have no choice but to send you to Azkaban."

* * *

Severus noted that Stitch's office was less crowded than it had been the week before. Many of those present at the debriefing, the Professor included, looked at him with distaste, as if he did not belong in their midst - but, Severus reasoned, hadn't that always been the case? He angled his chin upward, turned his wand between his fingers, did not speak, listened.

A handful of Slytherins dropped Muggle Studies and faded into obscurity. Avery and Mulciber stayed, and Joe Grasser who, it seemed, was determined to be their Peter Pettigrew. The Hufflepuffs took their seats the next week with drawn faces and stiff-lipped determination. Eileen Strike, the Slytherin girl who had cried, was not there.

Avery did not make Severus pay, unless you counted dark looks, sly jibes, and the plans Severus knew he had to be hatching. His actions could not have been forgotten, nor would they be. He guessed that vengeance would be exacted when the time was right, when Avery had had graduated - from Hogwarts, to Voldemort - and no longer answered to Albus Dumbledore.

For now he was being watched, by Avery and by others. He was very conscious of that fact.

He kept to himself, which was business as usual, he supposed.

He had mixed a thousand potions, written enough words to fill many excellent books.

He mixed more. He wrote on.

* * *

"Heard you tried an unforgivable on Avery."

Severus sighed. It had been three days since the incident and it seemed that Mulciber had decided it was time to pay him a visit in the dungeon. He dropped his quill into the inkwell, thought how dearly he missed the days of summer, when a nod had been enough.

As he looked up, slowly, he noted that Mulciber didn't sound angry. He sounded impressed.

"Hello Mulciber," Severus said evenly. He ignored Grasser, who was by his side and seemed equally admiring.

Mulciber smirked. "Thought you'd like to know he's scared to death of you now."

"That's nice," said Severus. And it was.

He turned his attention back to the Draught of the Living Dead - a new version, _his_, reached for his quill and continued in his detailed physical description of the liquid.

Mulciber did not budge.

The reason became apparent a moment later, when he said, a hint of accusation in his tone now, "Heard you've got a meeting with the Dark Lord."

Severus looked up again, as slowly as he had done before. "You heard wrong," he said.

"That's what I thought," Mulciber said, breaking into a grin. "I said to Grasser here: 'None of us have been called to Voldemort's side, and you're telling me _he_ has?' I said 'You're telling me the Dark Lord would want Severus _Snape,_" he was careful to emphasize the surname, "in his inner circle?'" He turned toward Grasser, "'You're even stupider than you look, Grasser.' That's what I said."

Grasser rolled his eyes, looked down at his feet dejectedly. "It's just what I heard," he mumbled. "I can't help it if my sources are going to be rubbish about things."

Mulciber shoved his palm at Grasser's ear. Severus returned to his work.

And still Mulciber was not on his way, and Severus knew he was watching him, weighing his next words.

He kept writing, fought the urge to react - to look up, to sigh, to ask him if there was anything else, to suggest that he leave now as he was very, very busy.

"Speaking of Mudbloods," Mulciber said finally, "heard your Gryffindor ex spends most of her time with her hands down - "

Snape stood up abruptly, raised his wand.

"Out," he said.

Mulciber eyed him, brow raised. Then he shrugged, turned and nudged Grasser toward the door.

Severus sat down when it closed behind them, dropped his wand on the bench, picked up his quill and resumed writing.

He pressed heavily against the parchment and the ink bled. He pressed against the stone floor till the balls of his feet ached.

He supposed that had been foolish. He supposed he might suffer for it later, when Mulciber was accompanied by stronger friends than Grasser.

Or perhaps, he thought, he would not. Avery had been careful, after all.

All of the Slytherins were very careful in that final year.

* * *

Lily heard about the incident in Remedial Muggle Studies. The way people told it, Severus Snape had been mad, completely unhinged, he had been overcome by evil at evil's heart and had turned on his classmate - "his _friend,_ Lily!" - thirsting for torture.

Lily slept and woke uncomfortably with that interpretation, turned it tentatively over in her mind and saw quite a different picture.

She could only imagine what it was like - _being_ in the Holocaust. Mersley had never used a Pensieve in their classes and she shuddered at the very idea. The moving pictures in her textbook had been quite enough to make her mad, completely unhinged, overcome by horror and helplessness, by a useless, insistent need to _do something,_ to _make it stop..._

February, fifth year. She remembered.

* * *

Lily skipped ahead as Mersley mused laboriously on a point of strategy. She turned the pages of her textbook in a fever of heartache, stopped abruptly, trembling, when she spied a familiar face in the background of a scene of slaughter.

It was a face she knew from a portrait that hung in the annex off the Great Hall - a wizard with a whiskered, sleepy face, a wizard who seemed thoughtful now, sad and serene at the same time, somehow out of step with those around him, even if he stood immobile.

_He stood immobile,_ Lily thought, her throat closing as she watched the bodies falling in the far corner, over and over again.

Her heart beat furiously as she watched the clock, and when class was over and Mary told her to hurry up or she was going to leave without her, she just shook her head.

When everyone was gone but Mersley she walked up to his desk and put the book, open and facing him. Actually, she didn't so much _put_ it, as drop it with an impressive thump.

Mersley looked up.

"Yes, Miss Evans?" he asked.

"This man, this wizard." Lily pointed to the picture. "Why didn't he do anything? Why didn't he try to help them? Some of them at least? Why..." She paused, swallowed quick breaths. "Why didn't anybody try to stop it?"

"We cannot interfere with the natural order of things," Mersley said in a way that was easy and weary, as though he had been asked this question many, many times before, as though he were tired of attempting to answer it.

Lily slammed the book shut and leaned over it. "_The natural order of things?_" she hissed.

More words were exchanged, hers heated, Mersley's cool, and it quickly became apparent to Lily that she was not going to get a satisfactory response out of him.

And so, with a parting shot of "How the _hell_ did that hat sort _you_ into Ravenclaw!", she stormed out of the room and straight to Professor McGonagall's office.

With all the courage her rage could summon, she demanded an audience with the Headmaster. She was somewhat taken aback when it was granted her.

Lily was calmer by the time she was ushered in to see him, and she thought that if the long walk and McGonagall's lecture about treating teachers with respect no matter the circumstances hadn't already subdued her, then the knowledge that she was stepping into Albus Dumbledore's office, a room very few students ever saw the inside of, certainly would have.

As she told the Headmaster what had happened, Lily was wide-eyed and distracted despite herself, looking around the round room at the unfamiliar faces on the walls, gazing up at the bright phoenix that soared freely under the domed ceiling.

She came back to earth when she heard Dumbledore say "Mersley speaks the truth."

"What?" she asked in a brittle voice. "How can you possibly say that?"

Dumbledore rested his elbows on the wide, polished desk between them, linked his fingers under his chin, spoke slowly. "It is widely agreed that there is a dangerous degree of integration between the Magical and Muggle worlds as things stand, and that - "

"_Dangerous degree of integration?_" Lily interrupted, her face pale, her mouth hanging open around the last syllable. "Are you saying people like me shouldn't be at this school? _You can't possibly be saying that._ "

"You misunderstand me," Dumbledore said, and it seemed to Lily that he was smiling at her the way people smile at babies.

"Explain," she demanded.

Dumbledore's smile widened. "I am happy to explain, Lily," he said, "if you are happy to listen."

Lily reddened as quickly as she had blanched. She looked down at her hands that were pressed against the desk, let them fall into her lap, looked up into Dumbledore's eyes that were blue and watery and kindly admonishing. She nodded.

"People like you, Lily, belong at this school, absolutely and utterly," Dumbledore said with conviction. "You are a magical being, through and through, as surely as your parents are not."

Lily held his gaze, waited.

"But Muggles," he continued, "true Muggles, do not belong at this school or in this world. That is a distinction..." he paused, chose his words carefully, "...that some among us do not understand."

Lily was silent, thought _Right. Some among us who live in the snake pit._

"Do you remember the letter your sister sent me?" Dumbledore asked, after a long moment had passed.

Lily looked off to the side, opened her mouth, closed it.

"I know you saw it," Dumbledore said gently. "I know how bitterly she wept. I know the things she said to you at the station, the way she has been divided from you ever since. I know what it has done to her, Lily, to be so aware of this world and still be separate from it."

Lily frowned, shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "Are you trying to say that I shouldn't have been born into my family?" she asked in a small voice. "That Petunia shouldn't have been my sister?"

"Oh no, by no means," Dumbledore said, lifting his hands high as though she had just said something entirely absurd and entirely unconnected with the statement that had prompted it.

It was irritating, Lily thought. Her fingers clenched around the wool of her skirt. She said nothing.

Dumbledore spoke on. "I sometimes think the luckiest among witches and wizards are those born into Muggle families." He reclined against the back of his tall chair, folded his arms. "It is they who are most bonded to the earth, who are most truly a part of the whole. I sometimes say to myself that Muggle-borns must surely be the wisest among us. That is why this school offers Muggle Studies at O.W.L. and at N.E.W.T. level. That is why I have lobbied the Ministry for many decades now to make it compulsory, alongside Potions, Charms, Defense Against the Dark Arts. It is, in my view, as important as any of those, and should be a part of each and every student's formation, regardless of, or perhaps especially in the case of, an adverse inclination."

Lily nodded in agreement, remembered how she had spent several exasperating days during the summer before fourth year trying, in vain, to bully Severus into signing up for the subject.

"We must be close to Muggle-kind," Dumbledore said, "and we must, with each same breath, strive for distance. It is an eternal struggle." He sighed, looked up at the adolescent phoenix that was still at play, swooping under the glass. "Muggles are our brothers, our sisters. I believe that is as true of those of us born into their lives as those who are not. But our world must remain separate from theirs wherever possible. If not? Collapse, chaos. This is known to be true. Wise witches and wizards have seen it even before the Centaurs looked to the stars."

Lily shook her head. "But why can't we just help them a little? When things are at their worst? There are things we could do, surely, that would make things..." She grimaced, cross that she couldn't find an elegant way to phrase her thoughts, settled finally for "... more right."

"I have often thought that myself," Dumbledore said with a sad smile. "But it is said that every action carries a consequence. And I fear that at its core, our world is as unstable and as wretched as theirs."

Lily eyed Dumbledore suspiciously. She wasn't sure she had really understood that last point, and as the seconds ticked into minutes and Dumbledore remained clever and silent, she found that she was tired of trying.

She left the room, stormed her way to the annex.

"Wake up!" she screamed at the portrait of the wizard who had stood immobile while the bodies fell. "Wake up!"

He slumbered on, his head hanging forward, his chin bobbing gently with the rise and fall of his chest.

"Wake up!" Lily screamed again. "Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!"

"Shh!" said a little lady in a portrait to the right of him. She peered at Lily as though she were the most ridiculous person on earth. "Silly girl!" she said, shaking her head. "He's not likely to wake up with you shouting at him like that now is he?"

Lily's brow furrowed. She opened her mouth to object, closed it, shook her head and walked, defeated and muttering, from the room.

* * *

Lily stared at herself in the mirror. She had been attempting to braid her hair and it had gone horribly wrong somewhere inside the memory. It was a tangled mess.

She ran her fingers through it, shook it out, sighed, remembered how that night in February of fifth year she had pulled her squashed and neglected polar bear out from its hiding place under her mattress, held onto it and cried fiercely.

Could it be that was the way Severus had felt?

He would never cry, of course, she could not imagine Severus ever actually _crying._

But it was possible, wasn't it, that the version of events gossiping its way through the castle was wrong. It was just possible, wasn't it, that in that moment, standing inside the purest of human suffering, far from reveling in it, he had just wanted to make it all stop...

Could it be that _Mudblood_ had truly been a mistake?

No, Lily reminded herself. A mistake was a one-off, and Severus had used that word too many times before.

_But,_ Lily wondered, her heart pounding as she dared to hope: Could it be that it was a true regret for him now?

She held the question tightly inside herself, and from then on, at meal-times, her eyes darted around the Great Hall, searching for the boy she used to call her best friend.

He was never there.

* * *

James proposed in January. Lily thought it was a joke at first and told him so quite readily.

"I propose to you and you think it's a _joke?_" James asked mock-reproachfully. "Lily Evans, you can be dead cruel sometimes, did you know that?"

Lily snorted, told him to stop being an idiot, was busy changing the subject when he produced a ring from his pocket, said, triumph already bright in his eyes "Would an idiot have this?"

It was stunning. A single large emerald set into a slender gold band.

Lily stared at it, completely flummoxed, because he was an idiot and he had a ring and he was _serious_ and... Merlin's... _knickers!_

"What... but... where did you get that?" she stammered when she found her voice.

"It was my mother's," James said, ducking down to try to catch her eye. "Well, my grandmother's. Then my mother's. Now..."

He left the word hanging.

Lily was still staring at the ring, her eyebrows wrinkling together as though she was trying to decipher a particularly tricky passage in Ancient Runes. "And she... she gave it to you?" she asked haltingly.

James laughed. "What, do you think I _stole_ it, Lil? Of course she gave it to me."

Lily looked up, smiled a smile that was nervous and apologetic. "But..." She swallowed and the smile vanished with the action. "Um... why?"

James laughed again. "Isn't it obvious?" he asked.

Lily blinked and he leaned in close, shaking his head.

"So I could play a fantastic joke on you by asking you to marry me, of course."

Lily pressed a palm to her forehead, let it slide down over her eyes, started to laugh with him. "_Um..._" was all she could say.

All James could say was, for the second time that night, "Marry me, Lily."

Her hand fell back down by her side and she looked up at him, her eyes wide, her mouth open, small, hurried breaths visible in the winter cold.

"You know what's going to happen, Lil," James said, his face suddenly grave. "There'll be a war, whether it's this year or the next - or the next, if we're lucky, maybe. And it could be a long war." He looked down at the ring, swallowed a lump in his throat. "Could be a lost war."

Lily didn't say anything - she was fairly sure that if she had tried she would only have managed _Um_ again. She reached out instead, pulled his free hand out of his pocket. Her fingers felt thick and numb as she twined them around his.

James looked down at their hands, then up at her. "We could be lost, Lily. I hate that it's true, but it is _true._ And I know that we're young and everybody would tell us to wait... but the thing is... I love you _now._"

"I love you now too," Lily whispered, before she could think, and it didn't sound quite right.

James raised an eyebrow. Lily blushed, rolled her eyes.

"You know what I mean," she said.

"Do you mean yes?" James asked earnestly.

Lily opened her mouth, hesitated. She tipped her head to one side and smiled. Then she frowned - smiled again - laughed - shook her head - sighed.

"Let's graduate first," she said finally. "There's time for that, at least, isn't there?"

"I hope so," James said. "But we can't be sure of anything anymore."

They looked into each other's eyes as they both took in the truth of that statement. Nothing was safe. Nothing was certain. The dreams they had might never be plans, might all too easily remain unfulfilled, far off. Forever.

The silence became painful, and Lily said indignantly, sniffling as she did, "There'd _better_ be time." She wiped quickly at her eyes with her free hand. "I'd _better_ not have spent seven years slaving away in the name of O's just to die before I even get the damned diploma."

James grinned, let it spill into a laugh. "Alright," he said. "After we graduate. Then you'll say yes?"

Lily smiled, sniffled again. "After we graduate," she said.

"So we're engaged to be engaged then? Is that fair?"

Lily groaned, swung his hand back and forth in hers, noted that she could feel her fingers again, her grip was once more solid. "If you want to put it like that, then alright, that's fair." She looked down at the ring. "But I'm not wearing that thing."

James' eyes widened, and he slipped the ring back into his pocket. "Blimey," he said. "You'd better not let my mum hear you call it 'that thing.' She might think you're less than perfect."

Lily sighed, smiled. "You know I didn't mean it like - "

James cut her off. "I know," he said softly. "And she'd never think you were less than perfect, anyway. She's not a fool, is she?"

He reached up and took a lock of her hair in his hand, leaned in and kissed her in a way that was deep and filled with soul, and in that moment Lily thought of weddings and wars, how they were each quick and inevitable, how they were strangely, grotesquely bound together.

She dragged the invisibility cloak over both of them, dragged James' lower lip between her teeth, dragged his shirt from his shoulder, dragged him all the way back to Gryffindor tower and into her bed.

* * *

Lily dreamed.

She and Severus were in that dim glade where they had spent so many summers.

It was hot. They lay side by side on the ground, cool grass soothing the skin it could touch.

Severus turned his head, smiled easily. "Voldemort killed the hat," he said.

Lily yawned as she nodded, wriggled around, feeling for new patches of relief. The back of her dress would be damp with sweat and dew when she stood up, she realized. How embarrassing that would be.

She rolled onto her side. Severus was still smiling.

"Petunia told me the circus is coming to town," he said.

Lily felt too lazy for laughter, smiled a _Hmm_ instead.

"We'll go," she said when she could muster the energy, reached out with a long drooping breath, rested her hand on his arm.

Sun trickled through the trees. She closed her eyes. She grinned.

"You can take notes," she said.

* * *

Severus Snape apparated into a room that was smaller than it seemed. The walls, which he found to be barely beyond his arm-span, had been bewitched to seem further apart than they were, and the ceiling was stars and darkness, a perfect copy of the Great Hall at Hogwarts.

He walked in a precise line, straight through the far wall, into a room that was exactly the same as the last but for one thing.

There was a wooden chair in the centre of it. And in that chair sat Voldemort.


	3. Chapter 3

Severus had a flat on the outskirts of Hogsmeade. It was easy enough for him to get to when he needed to.

He knew about the secret passage through to Honeydukes, but he also knew that it was used frequently by Potter and his friends, and even if it had not been wise to avoid them and their tragic little hex-wars, Severus thought the method distasteful. He considered it crude. He considered it too easy and too easily traced.

His method was far superior - a triumph of superiority as far as he was concerned.

For many weeks now he had spent long hours in the dead of night devising a way around the anti-apparation charm that protected Hogwarts.

Research had told him that the magic would be in the soil - the soil and anything connected to it. Trial and error had shown him that it was also in all school property and in anything that had passed through the gates or been delivered by owl.

The Headmaster had been thorough. But Severus found that he had not accounted for the improvements he had long been able to make to _Wingardium Leviosa._ Once he had mastered a little trick he called _Levicorpus Minimus,_ all it took was to find a secluded area of the grounds, strip naked and say the magic words.

He took great pleasure in his freedom, in the knowledge that with a careful whisper and a mind like a fist, he could come and go as he pleased, right under Albus Dumbledore's nose.

He was not overly concerned about being missed. After all, he had been more of a ghost than the ghosts for nearly two years now.

The flat was small and shabby, the stone floors were gritty and the chiminea was blocked. It contained a narrow desk and a wide armchair, a bed, vastly less grand than the one at Hogwarts in which he still spent most nights.

It was his castle.

* * *

The dream followed Lily into March. It was always the same one - or similar, at least - she often found she couldn't remember the particulars in the morning.

But it was always Severus and it was always her. It was always peaceful and she always awoke with a clenching nostalgia and a fear of what the future held.

She tried not to dwell on it. "It's just a dream," she said, and she reminded herself as she did that she was not, nor had she ever been, a dreamer.

Oh she had _dreams,_ of course, and plenty of them. But they were the waking kind that were better called goals, that would - all other things being equal - become plans, and then - all other things being equal - accomplishments.

She was not _dreamy,_ perhaps that was a better way of putting it. She was not one for lengthy reflection, and she had a propensity for what she called "common sense" that had more than once caused Ellen Markham to roll her eyes and call her a "cold fish".

"I'm not _cold,_" Lily had said with an eye-roll right back. "Just because I'm not a swoony little..."

She had been right to object - Lily Evans wasn't cold, not by a long shot. It was just that she weighed matters easily. It was just that to her the world was made up of things that were true and things that were not true, and it was in her nature to add and subtract those things, to categorize and column things up till she found pathways between This Fact and That Fact, till she saw a way forward that was quick and clean.

She was very, very good at knowing her mind, she thought.

That was why, for all her natural intelligence, the sorting hat had not thought for a moment to place her in Ravenclaw.

It was also why Severus had once called her calculating.

Lily smiled sadly as she remembered it. She had been as affronted as the time he had first called her a witch...

* * *

"Calculating?" she echoed, her cheeks flushing. "Thanks a _lot,_ Sev."

Severus looked up, his brow furrowing at the tone of her voice. "You're welcome," he said uncertainly.

Lily sat up, crossed her legs and her arms.

They were on her bedroom floor at Spinner's End in a sea of books and parchment and ten seconds ago she had been very cheerful and now she was not.

Severus, who had fallen back into a particularly engrossing chapter of _Magic and The Mind,_ looked up abruptly when Lily opened a book in her lap and slammed it shut.

"That was rude," she said stonily, once she had his attention.

Severus frowned, his finger lingering at the corner of the page he had been about to turn. "I didn't mean it to be," he said.

Lily raised both eyebrows - she could never manage one without the other - and waited for an explanation.

Severus chose his words carefully. "I only meant to say you're good at weighing things up," he said. "I meant you're good at seeing where you want to go and how to get there."

"That's not what calculating means, Severus," Lily said archly, opening the book in her lap and pretending to read.

"Isn't it?" Severus asked. He sounded perplexed.

"No!" Lily exclaimed, shutting the book again and rising up on her knees before him. "It means... sneaky. Sneaky and cold, actually, and it's not a very nice thing to say, for your information."

"Well..." Severus said warily. "I didn't mean it that way." He looked off to the side and added, like a question "Sorry?"

Lily stared at him for a moment. Then she made a sound like _Pfff,_ that turned into laughter. She tossed the book she was holding aside and fished around behind her for the one she'd actually been reading earlier.

"You have such a weird relationship with words, Sev," she said, shaking her head.

Severus raised an eyebrow - just one, Lily noted jealously. "Do I?" he asked.

"Yes," Lily said firmly. "You're so _sensible_ about them. Most of the time. And then... then other times..." She grinned wickedly. "Other times you're all _mushy_ with them."

Severus' brow dropped like a ton of bricks. "Did you just call me _mushy?_" he asked sharply.

Lily was still grinning. She lunged over towards him before he could realize what she was lunging for, grabbed the black leather notebook he carried around with him everywhere and opened it at the last-filled page.

Severus' eyes narrowed. Lily cleared her throat.

"The liquid isolated at the centre is the colour of full sun on fair skin," she read. She looked up, her expression gleeful. "Full sun on fair skin. That's _lovely,_ Sev."

Severus stayed perfectly still, tried not to appear annoyed or amused - the latter was easier to manage that the former.

"It's accurate, Lil," he said. He turned his attention back to his book, added nonchalantly. "You'll notice I also described the circles around it as 'concentric.'"

Lily laughed, tossed his notebook into his lap. "Yes, that's my point," she said. "You can't make up your mind. It's _weird_."

Severus continued reading as though he had not heard her.

"I guess..." Lily said slowly, shuffling forward and leaning down to get in his eye-line. "I guess maybe you're just a poet who hates being a poet," she teased.

Severus refused to let her face unblur, stuck resolutely to the words on the page.

_'... techniques that were developed by Muggle society in a futile and often dangerous attempt to unlock secrets we...' _

Lily was poking at his knees now, one index finger for each. "You're Lord Byron and you think Shelley's a ponce," she goaded, "Admit it!"

Severus' eyes leapt to the top of a new page, and for a split second they accidentally focused on her and as they did he saw that she looked so ludicrously pleased with herself. He found that he couldn't help looking back at her, couldn't help a flicker of a smile.

"You're ridiculous," he said with a sigh. "And just so we're clear, you love being ridiculous."

That was where the idea had come from - Severus was, from then on, always one thing and struggling to be another according to Lily - he was always _x_ and he always hated being _x._

A poet despite himself, a reluctant clown and many more between.

It was Lily's favourite game, and it sometimes drove Severus mad with embarrassment.

He did not enjoy being calculated by Lily Evans. Though he would not admit this to himself, he was always afraid that the numbers would come up short.

* * *

Lily tried not to dwell on the dream. For the most part she was successful. It was only in those slim two hours or so before the first class of the day that she was troubled by it, unable to turn her attention to Mary's chatter, to Sirius' jokes, to Remus' quiet second punch-lines, to James' fingers twined with hers under the breakfast table.

She ate her toast gingerly, stirred her tea till it went cold.

And as she did she looked uselessly around the great hall, first to the Slytherin table where Mulciber and Avery ate in concentrated silence, then, stupidly, to Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff...

She knew Severus wouldn't be there, she had learned that by now, and yet she still couldn't seem to help looking uselessly around.

Of course, she had realized many months before that if she actually wanted to see him she would have to be more pro-active about it. She didn't know the Slytherin timetable, but she could have tailed one of them. And even if, as she told herself, she didn't want to be late to her own classes, she knew there was one place she would be sure of finding her old - _ex_ - friend, if the past predicted the future with any degree of accuracy.

She wondered, one morning, as she stirred her tea endlessly, why she had never gone about things sensibly - why she had looked for Severus, with increasing fervour, in all the places she knew she would not find him.

The next morning, twenty mornings into March, she decided to be brave.

She dressed quickly, before Mary had rubbed the sleep from her eyes and found her voice, hurried through the portrait hole and out of Gryffindor tower.

It was a long walk, but it did nothing to calm her. With each corner her breathing quickened and her feet picked up the pace in time till she was almost running.

The clatter of her shoes on the steps leading down to the dungeon seemed too loud, and after the first flight she walked on the balls of her feet, tip-toeing a rush all the way down to the bottom.

She pushed open the door to the Potions dungeon roughly, like an angry person might, and she saw that Severus was there, that he was alone, that he was standing, that he was looking her way.

Lily thought it seemed like he had known she was coming.

He was silent and entirely still, and as she stared at him she began to feel his eyes were darker than she remembered, darker and unblinking and utterly focused on her.

Her hand began to slip from the doorknob and she fumbled, gripped it tighter, thought _He's changed,_ thought with equal conviction that he was a perfect memory, that this almost-man in front of her was the exact same boy she'd seen sprawled on his back in that dim glade, that the only difference was that he was standing now, narrow shoulders drawn tall, chin high, face burning with a certainty that terrified her.

He was impressive, she realized, and she didn't say a word, didn't move an inch, cringed inwardly at the sounds her laboured breathing made between them.

It might have been five seconds before she turned, stepped out of the room and slammed the door shut as roughly as she had opened it.

She ran up the stairs, all seven flights, not bothering to tip-toe this time. Her legs ached when she reached daylight - her whole body ached, she thought, and she thought perhaps she was following a path back to the dorm, then perhaps, she was heading for breakfast before it was served.

Neither turned out to be true.

Lily ran towards the lake and beyond it, halfway to the forbidden forest. She stopped at a spot on the vast expanse of grass that may or may not have been where she had sat with James nearly two years ago, and when she got there she coughed in a way that stung her eyes, thought how useless _Aguamenti_ was when you couldn't think how to conjure a cup.

She thought about running back to the castle, sat down on the grass that was cold, thought how the back of her skirt would be damp when she got up and how embarrassing that would be, seized a breath that was running from her lungs.

* * *

The dream stopped after that, or Lily stopped remembering it, and she thought perhaps it was because she had a waking vision to bug the hell out of her now.

She thought about those five seconds in the dungeon compulsively - in the morning when she woke, during her classes too, in the common room while she tried to piece together short answers to long questions, over a shared slice of treacle tart after dinner, under the gentle hum of James' breathing at night... Lily asked herself over and over why Severus had been standing when she had thrown the door open, why he had been looking her way, why he hadn't said a word, why she hadn't said anything either, why she had even gone down there in the first place if she had nothing to say?

It was a week before she realized she wasn't even trying anymore; she was dwelling unashamedly, like she had never dwelt before.

When it came time for Potions, she faked a cough that Mary saw right through. She ignored _Tsk, tsk, Lily,_ spent the afternoon in the hospital wing confounding Madam Pomfrey, who really was not used to having this much trouble with a touch of the flu.

It would have been silly even if she hadn't known Severus would not be there during the Gryffindor-Ravenclaw class.

As it was it was extremely silly, because she was hiding from a _room,_ for Merlin's sake.

She chided herself. But she did not stop coughing till the hour was up, and in the common room that night after dinner she nursed Mary's ironic mug of honey and lemon, stared at her feet curled underneath her on the sofa and asked herself over and over why Severus had been standing when she had thrown the door open, why he had been looking her way, why he hadn't said a word, why she hadn't either, why she had fumbled for the doorknob, why she had run away, why she had stopped between the lake and the forest, why she had stayed where she sat and cried for an hour.

"Oy! What is going on with you, Evans?" Sirius asked, a smile, as always, in his voice. "You look worse than Moony on his period."

Lily looked up in time to see Remus crumpling up a perfectly good bit of parchment. He threw it at Sirius and said "Leave her alone. We can't all be as obliviously cheerful as you."

_The war,_ Lily thought, _He thinks I'm thinking about the war._

And she wondered whether maybe he was right.

Because she had been a fool to think Severus' absence from the Great Hall at mealtimes had been about her.

And yet she _had._

_Had she?_

She swallowed, summoned a smile for Remus, realized, with horror, that she had been waiting.

All this time she had been waiting for Severus to come back.

It wasn't rational. It wasn't fair, either. It was _ridiculous._

After all, she had been very clear hadn't she - _Save your breath, I'm not interested, It's too late._

And yet she had been expecting him to sleep outside her door that night anyway. She had to have been, because hadn't she told Mary, when she had followed her to their room, how she was dreading it? Hadn't she told Mary how she was dreading having to kick him out again tomorrow night and the next and the next and for God knew how long? Hadn't she told Mary how she was dreading a pitiful letter filled with unsatisfactory apologies she absolutely would not be accepting?

The letter hadn't come.

And when she'd burst in on Severus in the Potions dungeon on Thursday morning the bench had been littered with cauldrons and parchment and books that she knew very well were not on their reading list.

It hadn't been about her.

It had been about Voldemort.

Lily's heart thudded dully like something being dropped.

_But you knew that,_ she reminded herself. _You knew this was coming. __You_ told him _this was coming._

So why had she run?

Why she had cried for an hour?

Why did it feel like she'd been waiting all this time for _something else_?

She leaned forwards slowly, set her mug down on a low table.

_I am not a dreamer,_ she thought.

The boys had started talking again.

"If they're building an army out of students - "

Sirius interjected scoffingly: "An army out of those twerps?"

" - then the Ministry damn well ought to be too," James finished. "Remus, you're going to have to wake up. This isn't about prefects and points anymore."

"Not that it ever was," Sirius muttered, his eyes rolling a long line from the ceiling to the floor.

"We can't wait for them to get us involved," James continued. "The Order's not asking us to join, so what? We're just going to have to go to them. You should ask to see Dumbledore, Remus, he'll listen to you."

"Right. Teacher's very furry pet," Sirius grinned.

Peter chortled approvingly out of nowhere, followed up with a joke that nobody heard.

Remus sighed, shook his head. "Dumbledore doesn't listen to anyone," he said quietly. "People listen to Dumbledore, that's the way it works."

"For now," James said under his breath.

He was silent after that. Lily was aware that he was glancing at her every now and then as he thumbed the pages of a notebook he had bewitched to look like his History of Magic anthology.

When she looked over at the same time as he did and caught his eye, Lily stood up hurriedly, almost fell out of her chair because she'd forgotten her legs were curled underneath her.

"I'm going to bed," she announced. "I haven't been sleeping. I really need to sleep."

She walked over to James and rounded the chair he was sitting in, leaned down over the back of it and pressed a long kiss to his cheek.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she whispered.

"See you tomorrow," he echoed.

Lily smiled behind him.

Remus smiled back. "It'll be alright, Lil," he said.

As she left the room James shook his head.

* * *

Lily hadn't known she had a plan when she'd said goodnight. It seemed to rush over her fully-formed once she had closed the door to the as yet empty dorm room, and she shuddered at the idea that it had been there, building in the back of her mind the whole time.

_In the back of my mind._

That was the point.

The Illustrum.

It took her the better part of an hour to find it. She had hidden it from herself nearly four years ago, buried it deep in the mess of clothes and books in her cupboard, wedged in a crease in the stone wall.

By the time she found it Mary and Jennifer Hoyle were opening the door, giggling breathlessly and spilling out sentences too quickly for Lily to make out where they began and ended.

"...can't _believe_ he actually said..."

"...sometimes think I'm going to _die_ from wanting..."

"...wouldn't say things like that if he didn't like you, you know, it's a classic case of..."

"...not even sure he was talking to me, it was you he was..."

"...get him alone, but Pettigrew may as well be surgically..."

_"Lily!"_ Mary said excitedly when she saw she was in the room. "Can you ask James to ask Sirius Black if he's interested Jen..." She glanced furtively at her friend, added in a small voice "... or me?"

Lily laughed, hauled herself into bed, clutching the little leather pouch in her hand. "You two, _honestly._ Sirius Black isn't interested in anything other than mayhem. How many times do I have to tell you that?"

"I don't knooooow," Jennifer wailed. "My loins don't seem to be getting the message."

Mary cackled as she pulled on her nightgown. _"Loins?"_ she wheezed, once her head had popped out the top.

Jennifer pulled her bandanna out of her hair and flicked it at her, slumped onto her bed with "My poor loooooins..."

Lily laughed again, tucked herself under the covers, glanced up at Mary's back as she tucked her coat and shoes in with her.

She pulled the curtains closed with a yawned "Goodnight, ladies. Don't let the loin-bugs bite."

* * *

Lily snuck out of the tower and into the night air. It wasn't hard when you knew how, and you'd have to be pretty thick to spend two years hanging out with James Potter and his friends and not grasp the basics of sneaking around.

There was only one flaw in her plan and that was the map. She knew that if James chose to go out too - and most nights he did - he would see her moving about the grounds. The thought troubled her. But it did not trouble her enough to keep her in bed.

Her confusion was like a full-body itch, and she felt wretched and desperate, as though she would still be compelled to do this even if Voldemort himself was waiting to pounce.

She rounded the corner of the castle and huddled in a darkened recess in the southern wall that was furthest from any of the dormitories or the Professors' quarters.

She was cold, even in her winter coat, and she got out her wand, said "_Fevrum._"

A thin veil of warmth descended around her. Her hands still shook as she pulled the pouch out of her pocket, tipped the little purple stone into her open palm.

She took a deep breath, peered into it, remembered the last time she had tried this, the _only_ time she had tried this...

* * *

"Where are you going?" Lily asked, as Severus made for the door.

He smiled. "You're not afraid are you? I thought all you Gryffindors were supposed to be - "

Lily scowled. "No I am _not_ afraid, thank you very much. I just..." she faltered, shrugged her shoulders, "I thought we were going to do it together, that's all."

Severus' hand paused over the doorknob. He looked utterly torn.

"I'll just be outside," he said finally. "You can call out and I'll hear you - the _Muffliato_'s not that strong."

Lily's scowl softened to a frown. "Don't you want to have a go though?" she asked. "You were so excited before."

"I am," Severus said quickly. "I will - later - if you don't mind. It's just that I'm not sure..." He looked down, ran his thumb over the ridges on the doorknob, and Lily could swear his cheeks flushed. "There might be things you wouldn't want me to see, so..." He opened the door, muttered "I'll be outside."

Lily nodded. She waited till he was gone to gulp.

She sat cross-legged on the floor and dropped the stone into her left palm as Severus had instructed. She undid the top two buttons of her shirt and slid her right palm inside, pressed it against her heart, again as instructed.

Then she stared down at the stone and took a deep breath.

_"Imaginum, illustratum, lustrum, illuminum."_

She didn't know how many times she said the words before the stone began to glow. She had become frustrated somewhere along the way and her mind had wandered to Christmas and the other presents she had received - the Led Zeppelin record from her mum and dad that Sev had turned his nose up at, the coconut scented shampoo with which she had threatened to attack him while he slept - oh and of course that awful pink thing from Petunia that she'd been forced to wear to the Bensons' that night - and Petunia had had that vile little smirk on her face all the way through dinner because she just _knew_ Lily hated it, and let's face it, wasn't that why the stinking cow had -

Light erupted from the Illustrum, tore itself into pieces and those pieces began to shape themselves.

Lily peered at the scene that was whittling itself out of the light. She peered at herself and... Petunia.

She squinted. They were rolling around on the floor and squealing, and Lily thought, with a bemused smile, that they hadn't played those kinds of games since they were very little. She was about to laugh at the ridiculous image of the two of them acting like they were five and seven instead of twelve and fourteen, when she caught sight of her face and froze.

Lily was snarling. And there were words to match.

_"You bitch,"_ were two of them. And then "You let her out so she'd get the potion! _You just want to see me expelled, don't you?"_

Petunia sat up, breathless and red-faced. "Maybe I _do._ Maybe that way you'll realize you're not _special._ You're nothing but a horrid little freak who doesn't belong _anywhere._"

Lily's jaw twitched and she lunged at Petunia, her hands claws.

She rolled them until Petunia was on her stomach, and pressed her knee between her shoulders, grabbed hold of her pony-tail and yanked her head up.

"_You're_ the one who doesn't be_long!"_ she whispered in a vicious rhythm. "_You're_ the one who's _nothing._"

Petunia struggled, fought against her half-closed throat to say "I... hate... you..."

"Yeah?" Lily sneered. "Well I hate you right back. And so does everyone at my school. I've told them _all_ about you."

"I don't care what your stupid goddamned freak friends think," Petunia spat out.

Lily's lips curled back from her teeth. She pulled hard on Petunia's pony-tail again and Petunia screamed.

"Mum and dad hate you, Tuney," Lily sing-songed, "Did you know that? They were so disappointed until I came along. I bet mum wished she'd never even had kids until then."

She slammed Petunia's face into the carpet to punctuate that statement, and Petunia growled against it, spit dripping down her lip, her eyes bulging.

"I bet she wouldn't even mind if..."

Lily looked up, yelled "Accio," and her wand shot into her hand. She leaned down, tugged Petunia's head up again, pressed the tip of the wand to her neck. "I bet she wouldn't even mind if I messed you up a little. You're already _ugly_ anyway so it wouldn't - "

Petunia reared up suddenly with great force. She knocked Lily off herself and lurched forward, slapped her face hard, once, twice, then again, and Lily's head banged against the carpet with each blow.

"Shut up!" Petunia screamed, "Shut your _stupid -_ "

She slapped Lily's mouth again instead of finishing her sentence, and blood trickled down Lily's cheek, she wheezed, the veins in her forehead pulsed under skin, and without appearing to think on it, without picking up her wand, she whispered "_Crucio!_"

It worked.

Petunia fell back, shrieking as her body contorted. Her face was filled with fear and she was trying to shake her head, but the pain seemed to have made her lose control of her movements. She wriggled around hopelessly as Lily watched, and then, as a keening wail escaped her open lips, she farted, loudly, several times, and a puddle began to form underneath her.

Lily covered her mouth with her hand. Lily laughed and laughed.

"Oh my God! You're _disgusting,_ aren't you, Tuney?" she said. "You're just dis_gus -_

Lily - the _real_ Lily - screamed.

Severus was in the room a second later and she was coiled back, hunched over, staring at the little purple stone that had rolled to an innocent stand-still on the floor.

"Lily? Lily? _Lily?"_ Severus grabbed hold of her and pulled her up against him, shaking her, shaking as he did so. He took her face in his hands and searched her eyes frantically till they finally focused on his.

When they did, they welled with tears.

"Oh my God," Lily whispered. "I... I know we were... I mean I know we're... but... I would never... _Oh my God..._"

Her cheeks began to tremble against Severus' fingers and Severus' fingers trembled right back.

"Lily, I..." he started to say, "What did... I didn't... We're not... You don't have to..."

"_Petunia..._" Lily croaked out.

Severus' hands fell to his sides. It was as though all the tension in his body had dropped away at the sound of Petunia's name, and if Lily had been paying attention, she might have wondered whether it was in relief or disappointment.

They stood, silently, for a long moment, and Severus thought about whether he should touch her again, whether that would help. He considered, briefly, pulling her against him, resting his cheek on her head, stroking her hair, because that was what you were supposed to do when people were upset, wasn't it? That was what he _wanted_ to do... wasn't it?

It was Lily who moved first. She straightened up and stepped quickly past him, bent down and picked up the stone off the floor, ran toward the window and pushed the latch back, was about to hurl it open when Severus stood and yelled, urgently, "NO! Don't do that!"

Lily whirled around, the stone still clenched inside her fist. "It's _evil,_ Sev!" she panted.

"No it's not!" Severus exclaimed. "It just tells... It's just stories." He shook his head, looked miserably down at the floor. "It's not evil," he said again.

Lily didn't say anything, and so he looked up, finally, said in an uncomfortable voice "At least sell it. Buy something you want."

"No," said Lily. "No..."

And she turned and pulled the latch back into place on the window.

When she turned back around to face Severus she said "No, I'm going to keep it. It's a brilliant present, Sev. I just... I guess I wasn't using it right. I'll..." She hesitated, found a lie. "I'll try it again some other time."

Severus didn't say anything. He was looking at the floor again.

Lily smiled, tucked the stone with still-shaking hands into her pocket, hurried forward and threw her arms around him.

After a moment, when it became clear that she wasn't going to let go anytime soon, Severus wrapped his own arms across her back.

He picked up a lock of her hair and held it away from her body, ran his other hand over it in a way he thought she might not notice.

* * *

Lily pressed her palm to her heart, eyed the stone in her other hand warily.

She would think of something - someone - safe, to start with. She would think of James. She would think of James in a world in which Voldemort did not exist.

She stared into the stone, and this time she only had to say the words once - _Imaginum, illustratum, lustrum, illuminum_ - to raise the light.

_James,_ she thought anxiously, fighting to keep the memory of her first try out of her mind, and finally the light whittled itself into his shape - his and hers, lying curled together in a wide bed that reminded her of her parents'.

She smiled tentatively.

"What, _Muggle_ university?" James asked.

"Yes," said Lily.

"But..." He frowned, brushed his hair out of his eyes. "Why would you want to go there?"

Lily sat up in bed and the covers slid down her body. She was naked, and Lily, the real Lily, looked around sheepishly when an owl in a nearby tree hooted.

James followed suit and sat up beside her. "I just don't get it, Lil. I mean... _Muggle university?"_

Lily shrugged, drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. "There are a lot of things they didn't teach us at Hogwarts, you know."

James muttered _"Lumos,"_ reached for his glasses, put them on and peered at her like he was checking she was quite alright.

Lily wriggled around to face him and laughed. "Don't look at me like that!" she said. "I haven't lost my marbles, James. I just think it would be interesting to get a broader education, that's all."

James nodded slowly. His mouth was twisting from one side to the other like he wanted to say something but didn't know what.

Lily was staring at her knees. "I never did finish reading Jane Eyre..." she sighed wistfully.

_Jane Eyre,_ the real Lily thought. Wasn't that the book Petunia had been reading for school the summer before third year? The one she had announced at dinner one evening had changed her life?

She bit her lip, kept watching.

"Muggle stories?" James was asking, his brow unfurrowing and furrowing again. "You want to study Muggle stories?"

"Yes!" Lily said defiantly. Then "No. I don't know. I haven't made up my mind on the particulars yet."

"But you've made up your mind to go?" James ventured, a hint of anxiety in his voice.

Lily shrugged again, turned her attention back to her knees.

"But Lil... how would you..." James looked up, his eyes bright as though he had just seized on something brilliant. "You wouldn't be able to get in," he said quickly. "I'm pretty sure Muggle universities don't put much stock in N.E.W.T.s - " he grinned " - however top shelf they may be."

"I could find a way," Lily said haughtily. "I could do it."

James sighed.

"Yes, okay," he conceded. "But..." His mouth twisted from side to side again and then "_Why,_ Lil?" burst out.

"Why _not?"_ Lily snapped back, throwing the covers off her and rising up onto her knees. "Why shouldn't I be a part of that world? I was born into it after all, even if you weren't!"

Her chest was heaving.

The real Lily's was too.

"Are you saying you'd go alone?" James asked in a sombre voice.

"Are you saying you'd want to come with me?" Lily countered.

James rose up on his knees as quickly, as violently as she had a moment ago. He grabbed hold of her hip with one hand, pulled her face to his with the other.

He kissed her over and over, and between kisses there were gasps, and between gasps, he said "I'd come with you anytime."

The real Lily gazed at her image and James', utterly transfixed by the sight of them coming together more and more ferociously with every second that passed. When she saw herself throw James down on the bed and straddle him, her hand closed tightly around the stone and the scene vanished.

She laughed nervously to herself, shook her head, thought how that had gone a lot better than the first time.

She smiled. She frowned.

Jane Eyre. She hadn't thought about that book for ages. She hadn't thought about any Muggle books or Muggle records or Muggle anything much for that matter in what... it had to be three years, at least.

_Muggle university._

Could it be true that some part of her wanted to go? It was a moot point, of course, given that in this reality Voldemort very much did exist, but still... all other things being equal... would that be one of the things she wanted to do with her life?

She passed the stone from one hand to the other and back again.

Her trial run had been successful. It had taught her something about herself - maybe - and that something had not made her wish she had been drowned at birth.

Lily was almost disappointed. If the trial run had gone badly, if she had seen herself hexing James till he soiled himself and laughing like she loved it... she would have had to stop. She would have had an excuse to hurry back to the dorm room and tuck the stone away in its hiding place once more - or toss it out the window for real.

But it had not gone badly and she had no excuse not to do what she had come here to do.

Lily set the stone carefully in her left palm again, pressed her right one to her chest, took a deep breath.

_"Imaginum, illustratum, lustrum, illuminum,"_ she whispered, and the sliver of silence between each word was _Sev._

The light rose quickly, too quickly Lily realized, because the image she was seeing was the same one she had produced earlier, only, she noted blushingly, a little _further along._

She chastised herself inwardly for being a randy at a time like this, redoubled her efforts to concentrate on Severus and Severus alone, and just as she was thinking maybe she would have to give the stone and its one-track mind - _her_ one-track mind - a rest and start again tomorrow night...

Lily saw her head tip back, and black hair that was too long and too lank tumbled down her neck.

* * *

It was Sunday afternoon and Severus was poring over _Night Spells and The Breaking of Day_ when a woman apparated inside his flat.

He thought idly of telling her just how rude that was, in case she didn't already know. Instead he asked "Who are you?"

The woman smiled slowly, tipped her head to one side. "I'm a friend of Lord Voldemort's," she said.

"Aren't we all," Severus muttered to himself. Then he asked "What is your name?"

The woman frowned - no, she pouted. "Don't you recognize me?" she asked in a voice that was girlish and gravelly at the same time. "I suppose you were just a little tyke when I was in my final year, but surely you've seen my picture somewhere. I was in an awful lot of clubs at old Warties," she whispered conspiratorially. "Quite the social butterfly I was."

"I don't recognize you," Severus said, although as he looked her up and down he was beginning to think that perhaps he did.

She had long dark hair that curled in ragged tendrils. Her eyes were wide and brown, her skin paper-white. Her mouth was shaped like a small heart and her cheeks were tinged with an unnatural redness.

She was probably considered beautiful, Severus decided.

"What is your name?" he asked again.

"You don't like guessing games, then?" the woman asked.

When Severus did not reply she sighed, pulled off green mittens, tossed them into a dusty corner. "I'm Bellatrix Lestrange. Though you might know me as Bella Black." She smiled, again slowly. "My cousin's not very fond of you, Severus Snape."

Severus' eyes widened before he could quite command them not to. "I'm not very fond of him either," he said.

"No?" Bellatrix asked, brightening. "Well that's something we have in common then! Blasted little Gryffindor ponce."

Severus narrowed his eyes, closed his book, remained seated. "Why are you in my apartment?" he asked.

"Because Voldemort wants me to be," Bellatrix said the way you might shrug. "He thinks you might be in need of some cheering up."

She tugged lightly at the tie of her coat, raised an eyebrow, bit her lip in a way that was supposed to be alluring, and Severus supposed that it was.

He dropped his book to the ground with a dull thud, sat back in his chair. "Are you Voldemort's prostitute?" he asked baldly.

Bellatrix gasped an affected little gasp, her hand fluttering up to her mouth. "I am a married woman!" she exclaimed, and she held her left hand up to the light, examined the golden band on her finger curiously. "I'm a married woman," she said again, to herself.

Then she strolled over to where Severus was sitting, pulled a long black wand out of her coat pocket, conjured a chair that matched his down to the fading roses blooming over the upholstery. She sat down in it, pointed her wand at the space between them, muttered something under her breath.

A small wooden table appeared, and on it a pot of tea, two china cups, scones and jam and cream.

She leaned forward. "Shall I be mother?" she asked with a sly grin.

Severus did not reply. Bellatrix did not pour the tea.

"I heard you're in _love..._" she drawled, leaving the last word dangling in the air, clinging to its _dot, dot, dot..._

"You heard wrong," Severus said evenly.

Bellatrix laughed loudly and too long.

She stood up.

"Well then. Do you want to open your present or do you want me to do it for you?" she asked, eyebrow raised, lip between her teeth again.

Severus remembered Christmas. The scarf that had made him much more cheerful, the stone he had sold his secrets for. He remained silent.

Bellatrix tugged at the tie of her coat, slipped it easily over bare shoulders. It fell the floor like a shed skin, and she stepped towards Severus, a glint in her eye, a fresh grin building.

She was standing before him in nothing but dirt-caked boots. His eye-line was at the pit of her stomach, and his slow breaths lifted the soft-wired patch of hair between her legs.

He leaned forward and took hold of her hips that were wide and slender. He did not look up to see her smile.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note - **ShakerMaker, thank you for your lovely review. Unfortunately since you don't have an account I can't message you to answer your question about the fic. If you'd like to email me, it's bluesuzannesallround at yahoo dot com dot au

* * *

Lily had learned three things from the Illustrum.

One. She wanted, on some level, to beat the crap out of her sister.

Two. She resented, on some level, being absorbed into the wizarding world.

Three. She was, on some level, sexually attracted to Severus.

_On some level,_ she said to herself.

When she had gotten back to her bed it had been after midnight and she had been exhausted. But she had not been able to sleep - at all. She had spent all night thinking about the things she had seen - the first time, the second time, the third...

It had taken her an inordinately long time to come to simple conclusions.

The second vision was easy. The resentment came from repressed fear. The whole Muggle university idea was a subconscious expression of her anxiety about Voldemort and the coming war, about the things the Wizarding world had in store that she did not want to have to face.

The other two were even easier. They were exaggerations, both of them. Extreme manifestations of random impulses that came and went so quickly that she never even noticed them. Or she _did_ notice them, and promptly hid them from herself. And there was a reason she hid them, Lily decided, a very good one. These were precisely the kind of mad thoughts you pushed down inside yourself in order to live a good life and make positive choices. It was precisely by your response to such base instincts that you determined who you were - the kind of person you were going to be.

So yes, she did sometimes want to slap Petunia when she was being particularly Petunia-ish, but the idea of actually, really hurting her like that, and taking pleasure in it... that was disgusting to her. Absolutely and utterly disgusting.

And yes, she did sometimes wish she could... reconnect... to Sev. But the idea of being with him like _that..._

Lily let out a short laugh, covered her mouth with her hand.

"_Ridiculous,_" she whispered. Then, slowly, carefully, she mouthed the word _Disgusting._

She sat up in bed, pulled the curtains gingerly apart and peered out into the thinning darkness, thought how as she had watched herself, wrapped around Severus as he had been wrapped around her, as she had watched herself raising up on her knees and falling into him, open-mouthed and lost to the world around her, the stone had rolled in her palm, the scene had tipped.

She had felt as though she were falling.

And she had remembered the moment at the top of Notre Dame, when she had tripped and seen the city lurch below...

She had not been in any real danger then; the wall had been too high and already gripped firmly in her hands.

But for a split-second she had _wanted_ to fall. That was why she had been so shaken afterwards. That was why she had resisted the full Potter-family goading and refused to climb up the Eiffel Tower, stood at the bottom with an icecream, binoculars hanging defiantly from her neck, while James had whistled and waved from above.

She had wanted to fall. And if she had let herself, she would have been dead at the bottom.

The things the Illustrum had shown her were like that - strange, dangerous instincts gathered from fear and weakness and confusion and curiosity. Instincts that needed to be squashed at all costs, in the interests of self-preservation - in the interests of preserving all that she held dear.

They did not define her. They were tricks, Lily thought. The mind was a tricky thing.

This was why she did not feel guilty when she leaned down and kissed James at the breakfast table the next morning. After all, nobody could control their subconscious, could they? She reminded herself of those gory-comical sex dreams Ellen had had about Nearly Headless Nick in fifth year, the ones she had recounted at the breakfast table with a kind of horrified glee.

Everybody had laughed.

Lily was sure that if she announced that she'd had a sex dream about Severus Snape last night everybody would laugh too.

But perhaps she wasn't in the mood to be funny, because she didn't announce anything when she took her seat at the Gryffindor table. And when James raised an eyebrow - _just one_ - and asked her if she had gotten a good sleep, she simply sighed exhaustedly, reached for the pumpkin juice, told a half-truth.

"I couldn't sleep," she said around a very genuine yawn. "My mind wouldn't shut up, so I took a walk."

James nodded slowly and Lily added it up with the sharp edge to his voice, knew that he had seen her on the map.

"You can always come out with us, you know," he ventured, once she had poured her juice. "If you're bored. Or restless."

Lily smiled. "I don't think the world is ready for a fifth Marauder," she said.

* * *

It was a Hogsmeade weekend, the last before the examination period would begin, and everybody was going. Under different circumstances, more people might have been inclined to see it as an opportunity to study, but since they were all aware, to varying degrees, that life-and-death was looming, they seemed to have decided, _en masse,_ to throw caution to the wind - _kick up your heels, paint the town red, etc etc._

Lily was staying behind.

She'd had a particularly unpleasant experience in Potions last week in which her fusing potion had gone horribly wrong. More horribly wrong than any potion she had ever tried to brew before. _Explosion_ wrong.

Her reputation was hanging by a thread, even if her average, thanks to a ludicrously lenient Professor Slughorn, was not. But whether Slughorn wanted to admit it or not, the truth was that she had been struggling to stay ahead of the pack for many months now.

She did not like to think how much that might be due to the loss of a certain study partner.

And so she was staying behind, to make damn sure she could produce a perfect _Fusus_ if called upon to do so in her final exam.

She and James had had a row about it on Friday night - or rather, she had had a row with herself about James. James was almost always unflappable, impossible to actually fight _with._ But he had teased her, called her a swot and a bore and a stick in the mud, and Lily had found it easy to be furious even as she rolled her eyes and grinned and called him a slacker and wondered aloud, with much shaking of her head, how anyone had thought it would be a good idea to make him Head Boy.

They'd made love after that. And on Saturday morning James was whistling as he climbed through the portrait hole.

"Are you sure you're not coming?" Remus asked Lily as he collected his things. "It's the last one before exams, you know."

"The last one before The End," Sirius sang mock-ominously, adding, as he followed James, Peter tumbling after "Move it, Remus, we're not going to wait for you all day."

"You go on ahead," Remus said, "I've got some stuff I have to do. I'LL MEET YOU AT THE THREE BROOMSTICKS!" he called out as loudly as he could.

And then he turned to Lily and stared at her until she looked up from her book.

"Lil..." he said hesitantly. "I think... I think you should come with us. We'll miss you if you're not there."

Lily rolled her eyes. "Oh yes, you four, missing me at The Three Broomsticks on a Hogsmeade weekend, I can imagine."

"Well _I'll_ miss you," Remus said earnestly. "And James will, obviously."

"Well you'll just have to survive without me for the day, alright?" Lily said with a smile. "I want my Potions crown back."

"Oh come on, we both know Slughorn would never take it away from you. You could probably have blown up the whole school and he'd be there, picking out bits of crown amongst the rubble to sprinkle into your hair."

Lily laughed, and Remus smiled. "See," he said gently. "I could entertain you all day if you like. Come on, it'll be fun. It'll make..."

"I _can't,_" Lily interrupted.

She had a feeling he'd been about to say it would make James happy.

"It's the last weekend, Lil," Remus said after a moment, with more than a hint of sadness in his voice. "Our last chance, maybe..." He leaned down and touched her arm, shook his head as if to undercut that hard truth. "Think about it okay. Come find us if you change your mind."

As he climbed through the portrait hole, Lily knew that he was right.

It was the last weekend. It was the last chance.

She would not change her mind.

* * *

Lily went down to the Potions dungeon. If Severus wasn't there, she was going to work until he was. If he _was_ there, she was going to gather some ingredients to take back to her room, and find out exactly what he was up to as she did so.

That was what this was about. She had to know what he was doing down here.

She had to know exactly what the Slytherins were planning.

She had to know exactly how far gone Severus was.

* * *

Severus stood up a moment before the door opened. It was her again, and he had known it would be - again - and he was terrified - again - hiding it well - again.

"I came to get Pilith Root," Lily lied smoothly.

Severus stared at her for a beat before sitting down, bowing his head over his parchment without so much as a nod of acknowledgment.

He felt frozen, immobilized, like a statue curved over an endless book, and yet, as Lily opened the store cupboard at the front of the room, leaned down, began rummaging around for her Pilith Root, he couldn't help lifting his head, looking up, secretly, staring at the way her hair fell down her back, at her arms that were bare and smooth.

She was wearing a yellow summer dress that tied at the neck and he thought how it really wasn't warm enough for it yet, especially down here where the air was damp and stone-cool.

He looked down quickly before she turned around. And then, again, he felt frozen, immobilized, and it took every ounce of strength he had to force his mind to command his fingers to move - to write, to write anything at all as long as he was busy, as long as he hadn't been looking, as long as he hadn't been loving her.

Lily straightened, cast a glance in Severus' direction.

Severus wrote _If the balance is not precisely observed, one may reap unexpected rewards, ranging from the mundane to the - _

Lily swallowed with a slow clicking sound like a door closing, thought to herself that perhaps the lie about Pilith Root had been a little too smooth, because there was no reaction from Severus.

There was nothing.

She wanted to leave, desperately. She wanted to stick to her story - take her ingredients, head back to her room and practice the _Fusus_ till it was all she could think about.

Lily hated herself as she walked towards the door, hated herself as she reached for the handle. She hated that she was so afraid to do what she had come here to do that she was just going to leave - just like last time - he wasn't going to say a word and she was going to leave the room, and it was the last weekend, the last chance, and she would know nothing about anything, and there'd be a war and a wedding and that would be that.

_Some Gryffindor,_ she thought angrily, gripping the thin paper package tightly in her left hand, as her right hand twisted the handle.

And then, miraculously it seemed to her...

"Isn't this a Hogsmeade weekend? This is a Hogsmeade weekend, isn't it?"

Severus had spoken more swiftly and unevenly than she had ever known him to, and in his haste he had asked the same thing twice.

_Sloppy, Sev,_ Lily thought with a quick impossible smile, and she gripped the door handle, turned still holding onto it, stood at an awkward angle and said "Yes, but I'm not going."

Severus felt as though he couldn't do it. He felt as though he couldn't ask her why. But it turned out he couldn't keep writing either, so he just stared at her, his fingers slipping into a fist around the quill.

"You must have heard about my spectacular failure in Potions this week," Lily said after a moment. "Slughorn's letting me make it up this weekend."

It wasn't strictly true. Slughorn had been happy to wave his magnanimous hand and award her a provisional O, but Lily had said no, she didn't need any special treatment, and immediately she had known she would have to stay behind that weekend - to work on the _Fusus_ - there was nothing else for it, she had told herself.

Severus hadn't heard about her spectacular failure. He said nothing. He just kept staring at her, like he was trying to figure out the things she meant that she wasn't saying.

Lily held up her packet of Pilith Root, shook it a little, tried to smile as she said "Anyway."

Still Severus said nothing.

Lily turned back to the door and twisted the handle again. The door swung open and light from the windows upstairs slid in.

She closed the door swiftly, turned around and said "Hey, so, do you mind if I work in here? I have a cauldron in my room but it's pretty small and I'm probably going to have to come down every five minutes to get something I've forgotten, and I guess since I caused a minor explosion last time I tried this my bed might not be the best place to practice so... do you mind?"

Severus hadn't moved an inch, but his eyes were a little wider than they had been a moment ago. "This room doesn't belong to me," he said slowly.

Lily grinned. "Right. You sometimes behave as though it does though."

She winced inwardly. _Used to,_ she thought, _You sometimes _used to_ behave as though it _did.

She walked over to the store cupboard and hauled out a cauldron, set it down on a bench a little further up the room, walked back to the cupboard and gathered up miscellaneous ingredients, not stopping to think which she needed and which she did not, returned to the bench and dropped them in a heap, pulled her potions textbook out of the bag that was slung over her shoulder, dragged out a stool, all of this without looking at him.

When she was done she sat down, opened her book, lifted her head, looked his way, stifled a sigh as she did. She'd misjudged things. She was further away than she would have liked, and he was reading again - or writing - it was hard to tell - he was so hunched over and his hair fell like a shroud...

Lily took a deep breath, narrowly avoided clearing her throat.

She pulled out her glasses - _James'_ glasses - a spare pair. She had stolen - _borrowed_ - them and enchanted them - _temporarily_ - with a magnifying spell.

She put them on, blinked at the effect. Severus' face was huge when he looked up and peered curiously at her.

"For reading," she muttered. She attempted a smile. "Must be getting old."

Severus held her gaze - no, he swamped it with his. His eyes were enormous and full of things she couldn't fathom, and she thought that the naked eye lied, because they weren't black anymore, not entirely, there was a greyish tinge that bled into the whites, there were dim ambers round the pupil, like flecks of fire.

Lily pressed her lips together. He was three benches away, but he may as well have been in her lap, and suddenly she felt silly and afraid.

_Ridiculous,_ she thought, but it might have been spelled another way.

Severus looked down, shuffled the parchment he had been writing on into the book he'd been reading, closed it, rested a blank sheet of parchment on top.

Then he leaned down, pulled another out of his bag.

_Advanced Potion-making._

Lily could barely stop herself from rolling her eyes.

Severus read, or, as Lily suspected, he pretended to. So did she - pretended that is, it was utterly impossible to read anything at close range with these things on - and every so often she glanced up, guessed like a quiz shower loser at the nature of the liquid simmering in the cauldron to the right of him, peered uselessly at the pearly gas wavering out of a pair of beakers, at the red, brown, ochre fumes lifting from several smaller ones.

Finally she decided she would have to speak, started tossing the first ingredients for the _Fusus_ into her cauldron so she would have a prop, was busy with a bit of casual stirring when she asked "So what's in the cauldron?"

Severus looked up. "A potion, Lily," he said.

His voice was closed. Hard. Too hard even to be teasing.

Lily looked down and felt something surging inside her - anger, maybe - or disappointment - regret. Because she had really bungled this, hadn't she?

Severus knew exactly what she was trying to do; he'd started hiding from her the second she'd put the glasses on - maybe before.

Lily took the glasses off, dropped them wearily on the bench.

It was hopeless.

And she felt in that moment as though Severus hated her.

She felt as though she hated him.

She wanted to leave again.

She wanted to stand up and yell "Alright, just tell me. Are you one of them? Are you going to be on the front line, picking off Mudbloods like me?"

She nearly did both, several times.

And then, as the minutes ticked by, unmarked, unsounded, she had another idea.

No, not an idea, not really. It didn't come with words or pictures. But it did come - suddenly, overwhelmingly, it rushed around her like a downpour on a day that wasn't meant for rain and she -

Severus stood up. The stool he'd been sitting on made an abrupt scraping noise against the stone floor, nearly toppled over with the speed of his movement, and he strode over to the side bench, and a second later - half a second - a quarter - an eighth - a tiny sliver of no time at all, Lily stood up and strode just as quickly over to the side bench too, just exactly right to where he was, and she reached up, she flung her arms around his neck.

Severus was still for the briefest of moments. Even though he had had a feeling this was coming, even though he had known somehow - he had _known_ and it was why he had stood up and walked over here... he still felt as though he were in shock.

He was still for the briefest of moments. And then he wrapped his arms around Lily's back and drew her body to his, leaned down and let his face rest with a low buried sigh between her shoulder and her neck.

They stayed like that for what seemed like a very long time - far longer, at least, than they ever had before, and when Lily, for the first time, was the first to draw gently away from him, Severus felt something like a sob rise in his chest.

He swallowed it. Hard.

Lily's hands were on his shoulders when she looked up at his face and said, in a way that was tender and fierce at the same time, "You're so skinny, Sev. Do you even eat anymore?"

Severus blinked, twice. And then he began to shrink from her.

And as his hands slid from her body, as the weight of him lifted away from her, as he fell back into himself, Lily was sure she shouldn't have said that, she was sure she had hurt his feelings with it, and she remembered when she had told him the Illustrum was evil, she remembered the wretched look on his face when he had insisted that it wasn't, she panicked, grabbed at his shoulders, let go, took hold of his face just as he was turning and kissed him on the mouth.

_I have to know,_ she thought, and _How far gone..._

His hands were cold on her arms and his mouth was hotter than she'd expected.

She hadn't expected anything at all, she reminded herself.

_Certainly not this - Cerfainly not - _

Severus kissed her back with terrifying enthusiasm, and she was quickly arched, as he was quickly bowed.

Her hands slid limply down to his neck with a rough exhalation, and she pulled at his robes to get closer, not to get them off him, though that was what happened, that was how they came undone, spilled from his shoulders to the ground.

And then he was clutching at her dress like he was getting nowhere, and then she was making short work of his shirt.

The buttons were too easy, Lily thought, too easy, and his teeth were on her cheek, his tongue tripped over her jaw, and she hurried back to his mouth, so they were fused again - _reconnected,_ she thought.

On some level she -

Her lips pulled hard on one of his and his mouth opened wide with it, and then he was finding the knot at her neck and she was whispering things into the crook of his, things neither of them could hear.

It was mad. Her head was on fire. And he was making all these noises that were so un_him_ - low and senseless, abandoned, picked up in her own throat. Lily thought faintly that Severus was an old machine creaking into life, and she reached up, up and behind, tangled her fingers in the mess his were making.

The knot dissolved and no one caught the straps. Lily's dress fell down in fits and starts, trapped fleetingly between their chests, their ribs, their stomachs, dropping with every subtle shift of their bodies till it settled round her waist.

She wasn't wearing a bra underneath, because it was a halter-neck and anyway this was the seventies and if Lily Evans hadn't had better things to do she probably would have burnt all her bras years ago.

There was so much skin. Severus had never felt this much skin against his - well, not since he was a baby, but it didn't count if you couldn't remember how it felt.

Not since _Sundays with Bellatrix Lestrange_ - but it didn't count if you couldn't feel it - it didn't count if you couldn't feel the right things.

Severus tore his lips from Lily's, leaned down, reached hungrily for any part of her back his hands could touch. His hair fell down her neck and she gasped, she closed her eyes, she reached up and delved into it, right to his scalp that was gritty and too-moist, she thought of the coconut shampoo, she smiled, she pulled his head from her neck and laughed into his mouth.

"Sev," she said.

He said "Lily."

And then her hands were at the front of his trousers and she was tugging him along with her, back towards his bench, and her eyes were wild and fixed on his.

_"Sev,"_ again.

_"Lily,"_ again.

Her hands slipped easily under the waistband of his trousers - they sat too low already - he was so skinny - he was so -

Her fingers fumbled over his hipbones, and he was making those noises again, louder now, even less like him, and his hands reached down mindlessly, drew the bottom of her dress up to meet the top - up to the shallow bed of her waist - and he pressed himself against her to anchor it, he bent his knees and reached down again, drew his hands up the bare backs of her thighs, thought _soft_ and _impossible_ and _I want -_

At the same time, Lily's hands slid, seamless, all the way up his sides till they were ready at the place where his shoulders curved into arms, and she took hold, she held on tight, she turned them around and pushed him towards the bench behind.

She was kissing him before he could speak. She was hauling herself up before he could stop her.

"Li - I - Do - Ca - "

Lily's lips kept pulling the words away, and she grabbed at him, pulled his body over hers, she swept back -

"Lily - careful - _No!_"

The little beakers went first, tinkling like bells to the ground. The pearly liquid followed. And then - Lily hissed - the cauldron was hot and she had hit it so hard - it tipped, turned, tumbled down with a thudding sound sharpened by glass beneath it.

The mystery book fell, open, face down.

Parchment fluttered wetly in its wake.

Severus saw all of this.

Lily was kissing his neck and whispering his name, and he watched precious liquids pooling into each other, soaking precious pages, dipping into the stone floor with a grim, crackling sound.

Severus swallowed. His throat filled.

He stared at the shattered mess on the floor and thought _My work - my_ ideas, _my - blood, sweat and no tears, no, I don't - my_ work!_ - my dream - my ticket -_

_Lily. Careful. No._

He stood stock still.

When Lily's teeth grazed his earlobe he shivered - when her hands found his hips again, when she whispered _"Sev,"_ and _"Please."_

Her mouth covered his, and Severus' eyes were wide open and he was thinking _Reparo, reparo._

He should have been pulling away. He should have been screaming at her - _What did you do? How_ dare _you?"_

But he didn't. He couldn't.

All he could do was stand still while she kissed him and think, over and over - _Reparo, reparo..._

The mess on the floor did not surrender. It was useless.

It was too far gone - the balance was lost.

And still he was thinking it with a strange, irrational desperation - _Reparo, reparo_ - over and over the word echoed in his mind, and still and _still,_ nothing on the floor moved, nothing moved except Lily's mouth, Lily's hands, Lily's legs around his waist, and it was then that Severus realized, suddenly, absolutely, that it _was_ an echo - that he was thinking it because _Lily_ was thinking it - that he was thinking it because Lily had thought it _first,_ and he shuddered, head to toe, he pulled back, he held her away from him, he looked at her.

Lily's hands lifted. She was holding his face.

Her eyes were wide. Her heart was pounding under his forearm.

She said, softly, "Sev..."

And then he was kissing her, and it went on, over and over it went on, murmuring in both their bodies - _Reparo, reparo_ - and Severus' work was broken on the floor but he had never felt so whole in his life.

He had never felt so happy.

He closed his eyes and imagined the dungeon was flooded with light - the kind of light that warmed you to the bone.

He was smiling, in that awkward way you smile when your lips are busy.

He was smiling - when she undid the buttons on his pants, when she pulled his hand down between their bodies and pressed his palm into the place between her legs.

_Warm. The kind of warmth that lights you up._

That was the end of the interlude. If time seemed to have slowed, it began to speed up again directly. Things charged ahead, and it wasn't long before Lily's hands were really, truly, all the way down Severus' trousers, it wasn't long before he was trying to push her knickers down.

It wasn't going too well - once again, he was not having nearly as much success with his mission as she was with -

Severus gasped sharply - he gritted his teeth - he dragged his lips along hers - he tried to focus -

The trouble was that every time his fingers pushed at it, the waistband just kept rolling into itself, clinging resolutely to Lily's hips. Severus groaned frustratedly, groaned again when Lily pulled her hands out of his trousers. She laughed, kissed him, slipped her hands under his, whispered "Don't push, pull," and then, just as it seemed she was about to give him a practical demonstration in the art of knicker-removal, she withdrew her hands abruptly, said "Shit!" followed closely by "Sorry," and a sheepish smile.

She slid around the side of him, jumped down off the bench, muttered breathlessly, "Someone could - I'll just get my - "

She had hardly made it past the bench when she heard a loud clicking sound coming from the door. She whirled around just in time to see Severus' hand return to his side.

"What?" she spluttered. "Where's your - how - "

She grinned broadly, and for a moment Severus thought she might have been going to clap her hands. "How did you _do_ that?" she asked.

Severus smiled the slowest, steadiest smile he could manage. He tipped his chin up and said "I've made some improvements since you've been gone."

The second he'd said it he wished he hadn't. Because he'd realized, a beat too late, that his half-naked body was entirely on display right now, and any improvements he had made in that regard had been minimal to non-existent.

He was skinny and pasty.

She was _spectacular._

Lily Evans was standing a few short steps away from him, her dress around her waist, and Severus thought that she was, without doubt, the most gorgeous thing he'd ever seen.

She was pale but sun-blushed at the same time. She was slender in all the places he thought a woman should be, but never bony. His eyes drifted downwards. _Not even her knees,_ he thought forlornly.

His shirt was still hanging around his wrists, and he had a sudden and near overwhelming urge to pull it back around his body.

In that moment he felt as small and as stupid as the mornings his father had found the wet patches on his bed. He felt as wretched as the time James Potter had had him upside down in the air, ready to take his pants off for the crowd.

He remembered - he couldn't help remembering.

_I'd wash your pants if I were you, Snivellus._

Lily didn't feel small or stupid or wretched. She had always been rather happy with her body - there was no reason why she shouldn't be, after all. Her parents hadn't been particularly religious either - Christmas was all about the tree and the pudding in their household, not so much the birth of Jesus. And so she had never really understood what it was to be ashamed of the naked state.

That was why she was quite content to stand there, barely dressed, and stare at Severus who was barely dressed also.

His trousers were hanging onto his thighs - just - and she gazed curiously at the prominent hipbones her hands and wrists had been all over a moment ago, at his ribs so visible with every breath he took, at the muscles in his forearms that seemed disproportionately large in comparison with the rest of him.

It seemed like a lot of time passed in which she did not move or avert her eyes, and Severus found he was beginning to harden in all the wrong places.

Then, just as the stillness was becoming unbearable for them both for very different reasons, Lily took the short steps back to his side and started touching him.

She was slow and trembling. One hand dipped over the small of his back, under his trousers. The other travelled his arm all the way to the lank black hair at his shoulder. That was the place her lips found, when her hand had cleared the way, and it was so gentle that it sent Severus' lungs mad.

He wanted to say things. He leaned down and pressed his mouth to her arm.

And then his hands were on her again, his fingers shifting the fabric of her dress slowly around her hips and thighs.

Lily pressed back against him, pressed forward against him a moment later.

Her lips were creeping up his neck, and she took hold of his hair, dragged his head up, slid her arms over his shoulders and squeezed herself tight around him. Her cheek rubbed softly against his, and then they were kissing again, and it seemed their bodies kissed too, every time, all the way down to her bare left foot that curled around his ankle, over and over, all the way up to his hands clutching in her hair.

Things were charging ahead again, Severus thought, and just as he did, there was a rattle at the door.

Lily jumped away quickly. "Shit!" she said. She didn't bother to apologize for it this time - she was too busy making a break for her bench, pulling her dress up and tying a hasty knot as she did so.

Severus was fumbling with the buttons on his pants, trying to shrug into his shirt at the same time, thinking how unfair it was that Lily had so much less to do to make herself presentable, and by the time he'd retrieved his robes from over by the side bench she had found her wand, was pointing it fiercely at the door and whispering futile _Alohamoras._

Severus shook his head, threw his robes over his shoulders and pulled them around himself, raised his hand.

The door clicked and a second later it opened.

Professor Slughorn walked in.

"Ah, Severus," he said. He turned back and eyed the doorknob quizzically. "I think this door needs some attention. The lock always wants a different jiggle, quite peculiar."

What he noticed next was the mess on the floor. His eyebrows raised. "You'll want to clean that up, Severus - goodness, it looks as if it's trying to burn a hole in my floor! Right through the stone! I don't know..." He was muttering now, shaking his head. "The things you get up to down here... I don't know..."

Severus was nodding to himself and thinking of the best way to go about cleaning up without being too conspicuously brilliant when Slughorn turned and saw who else was in the room.

"Lily!" he exclaimed, throwing his arms wide. "What on earth are you doing down in this grubby old tomb?"

Lily stretched in her seat, flipped idly through the pages of her textbook. "Oh, just figuring out how to blow the castle up," she said with a little eye-roll. "Or how to make the perfect _Fusus_ - who knows which."

Slughorn waved both hands emphatically in the air. "Oh nonsense, nonsense, silly girl. I told you I'm quite happy to overlook that little glitch! It's a Hogsmeade weekend for Merlin's sake - you'd best be on your way before The Three Broomsticks runs out of butter beer!"

Lily smiled. "What are _you_ doing down here, Professor?" she asked. "Aren't you usually the one who drinks them out of house and home?"

"Very funny, Miss Evans," Slughorn said, admiring-admonishing. "But truly, it's a beautiful day - a beautiful weekend. And the last one before your examinations too - which, incidentally, is why I am stuck here, planning the blasted thing."

"Poor you," Lily crooned sympathetically. "I hope you're not going to take it out on us and make it _too_ tricky."

Slughorn chuckled to himself, shuffled over to the desk at the front of the room and set down the pile of books in his arms. "You'd better not look, you two," he said with a wink that was entirely aimed at Lily. "I wouldn't want anyone getting an unfair advantage."

"Of course not!" Lily said, with the beginnings of a smirk.

_Of course not,_ Severus thought with less levity.

Lily and Slughorn continued with their unpleasantly flirtatious banter, and as Severus used his wand to deposit the mess, shard by miserable shard, into the cauldron, he couldn't help thinking how easy it was for her to charm people. She could probably charm anybody in the whole world, he realized, with a surge of something that was equal parts revulsion and - what was that - oh yes - _adoration._

He looked over at her with a tentative smile. Her back was turned, she didn't see.

Slughorn was regaling her with tales of Potions students past and Severus was staring at the way her hair fell down her back, at her arms that were bare and smooth.

He was looking and he was loving her.

Once the remaining liquid had been properly scourgified, he looked down and noted with some satisfaction that there was indeed a hole in Slughorn's floor.

_Unexpected rewards,_ he thought to himself.

When he stood up he saw that Lily was dutifully sorting the ingredients for a _Fusus._ He watched as she lugged her cauldron over to the sink and tipped her earlier efforts away.

_Pilith Root,_ he thought with a second unseen smile, and he waited till she was done, followed suit, headed back to his own bench, sat down, bent low, and began to surreptitiously do up the buttons of his shirt under his robes.

It was a long time before Lily looked over at him, and when she did he was not looking at her. He was reading - or pretending to read. He was hunched over his copy of _Advanced Potion-making_ again, and Lily thought to herself that that might have been the only thing that had survived her clumsy assault on his bench.

She smiled a sudden smile, swallowed it away. She remembered how Severus had bought that book in the summer before fourth year - a full two years before it would appear on their reading lists. She remembered how he'd scribbled notes all through the pages, sometimes even recording her own observations, neatly marked with a small 'LE'. Lily smiled again, swallowed it again. Her mother strongly disapproved of the practice of writing in the margins of books, and so all of hers were pristine as the day she had bought them.

With a pang of something like loneliness, she realized that if things hadn't turned out the way they did, the two of them probably would have shared that textbook in sixth year.

She shook her head, shook her shoulders too.

She caught sight of the glasses on her bench and her stomach clenched violently. She caught the tail-end of one of Slughorn's jokes just in time to laugh.

Severus and Lily worked for a long time. It might have been hours that they sat there, reading, writing, mixing. Slughorn hummed constantly, and he could never seem to make up his mind to follow a particular tune. It was maddening. The entire situation was maddening.

But it seemed as though neither of them dared leave the room. It seemed as though neither of them dared think of anything other than N.E.W.T.s. Severus hadn't thought of those in a very long time, and he frowned as he examined the array of devastatingly simple concoctions he might be called upon to create. Lily lost herself easily - she really was behind, after all.

When Slughorn's humming stopped suddenly it was as thought a bell had rung. "Oh!" he said, pulling his pocket-watch out of his robes. "Goodness! Yes! How time flies!" He closed the book he was reading with a flourish. "I think you've tortured yourself enough for one day, Lily - the boys will be back any minute."

Lily made a small sound in the back of her throat. The stool beneath her teetered when she stood up abruptly.

And then she left the room. She simply stood up and left, without even packing up her things, and Slughorn might have been affronted, he might have made anyone else but her come back and clean up before leaving his classroom, but no - he smiled kindly, caught Severus' eye and said "She's such a clever girl, I really think..."

Severus stood up too. He was not naive enough to think he would get away with failing to clean up after himself. He did so at lightening speed, not bothering to nod and murmur at Slughorn's Lily-induced raptures.

He left the room at a run.

He ran all the way up the stairs, and when he reached the top, he caught sight of a flash of red and yellow rounding a corner up ahead.

"Lily!" he called out, walking now because he could hear from her footsteps that she was, however briskly.

He heard her voice before he saw her again - "Sev, I'm sorry, I can't - I can't do this, not right now. I have to..."

"Lily!" he called out again. She did not slow.

Severus may not have been athletic, but his legs were long. He caught up with her quickly, and when he did he grabbed her arm and pulled her around to face him.

"Lily..." he said. "_Please..._"

She looked up at him, her eyes wide, her lips pressed tightly together. And then she shook her head, turned and picked up the pace.

She was running now. He was running after her.

He didn't bother calling out anymore - there was no point in calling out to people when they already knew you were there. But he still couldn't stop himself following. Even though it must have been equally pointless, he still couldn't help catching up with her again.

They were outside the main castle doors when he did, and Lily could see James approaching, Peter and Remus not far behind, a small crowd gathering around them.

Lily stopped dead, tried to command her arm to lift, her hand to wave.

They responded, weakly, and as they did, Severus caught her wrist, pulled her to him. "Lily," he whispered. "You can't... This wasn't... I won't... _Tell me..._"

But Lily didn't tell him a thing. And James was upon them.

"Hey!" he yelled with perfect indignation. "Get your hands off my girl!"

Lily was silent. Severus' eyes did not leave hers.

His hand tightened compulsively around her wrist before he let go.

And then looked at James with an expression of purest disgust. And then he turned it on Lily with a sneer.

"Next time," he said with deliberate slowness. "Try and steer clear of my potions..." He paused, mouth open around his next words, and Lily thought she could see the little flecks of fire in his eyes when he added "You stupid... _stupid_... bitch."

It happened very quickly. Too quickly for Lily to quite understand it. Severus began to walk away. James' hand moved, perhaps towards his pocket. And exactly as it did - almost _before_ it did - Severus turned, raised his hand.

And then James was on the ground.

Lily scrambled down beside him. A thick bruise pulsed under his jaw, and then it seemed to be crawling, no, _growing_ - over his cheek, down his neck, under his robes.

His teeth were clenched and bared, long groans of pain hissing through.

Severus lowered his arm and it stopped immediately. The blackened skin cleared in an instant.

He began to walk away again, and James began to clamber onto his knees, he began to reach into his pocket for his wand.

But Remus was holding him back. "No, James," he whispered urgently. "Not here. The others are coming, they'll see. Rosier's been dying for an excuse to report us again."

James panted and strained. Remus held firm.

Lily watched Severus' retreating figure, thought how it was lucky for him, lucky for James, lucky for her, lucky for all of them, that Sirius had chosen to lag behind.

* * *

Severus packed his things.

He left his tattered copy of _Advanced Potion-making_ behind with the rest of Hogwarts.


End file.
